With its inventive videos and bizarre memes, TikTok once billed itself as “the last sunny corner on the Internet.” Since launching five years ago, the app has become a global sensation, amassing millions of users every year.
Despite delighting consumers and advertisers, others believe the “sunny” app has a dark side. As ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok and is headquartered in China — a nation whose government is known for surveillance and propaganda — its ownership has triggered fear about it becoming a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tool for tracking people worldwide and censoring content.
