TikTok and the X factor
Why you either love it or hate it. And Ismail Kadare on a different sort of mind control
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The Big Story:
TikTok gets shut down in the US from Sunday (Jan 19) barring X-factor intervention of some sort, and Albania started 2025 with its government vowing to ban the world’s most downloaded social media app.
Both countries invoke TikTok as something to be feared, albeit in different ways, and say that blocking the popular video platform will protect their people.
This sentence in our first book pick is worth noting:
“…[it’s] a strange turn of events for an app that was forged in the market, strengthened through acquisition and capitalist competition, and run by a far-seeing Chinese entrepreneur who studied Western businessmen”.
This Week, Those Books:
A tech journalist recounts how TikTok went viral.
Mind control is not just about social media, says former Communist Albania’s greatest chronicler.
The Back Story:
TikTok rose to prominence in 2019 and by early 2020, it was the most downloaded app globally.
The US alleges it is a security threat because TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has links to the Chinese state. ByteDance, born in China but incorporated in the Cayman Islands,1 denies this. About 170 million Americans, half the country’s population, use the app.
Albania blames the allegedly malign influence of TikTok, which its prime minister calls "the thug of the neighbourhood", for the fatal stabbing of a schoolboy in November. TikTok has raised questions about this.
The site is banned outright in several countries, including India, Nepal, Afghanistan and Somalia and faces hostility from a clutch of governments in Europe, North America and Oceania.
Experts say much of the criticism is about geopolitics because it is “the first social media ‘platform’ born outside the US to significantly rival the Silicon Valley incumbents”.2
Donald Trump, who imposed sanctions amounting to a ban on TikTok3 during his first term as president is now opposed to outlawing it. So is Elon Musk, his close ally and CEO of X, formerly Twitter. Musk’s name is being floated as a possible buyer of TikTok to prevent the US ban. If X were joined to the video app, it would massively expand Musk’s social media empire and reach.4
This Week’s Books:
TikTok Boom: China's Dynamite App and the Superpower Race for Social Media
By: Chris Stokel-Walker
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Year: 2021
The problem with any published book on TikTok is that it will be up-to-date for roughly the lifecycle of a viral video. In the three years since tech journalist Chris Stokel-Walker wrote TikTok Boom, the platform has had too many viral videos, trends and internet celebrities5 to count. Even so, this is a good narrative on TikTok’s relatively quiet beginnings and noisy, turbo-charged progress. It started as Musical.ly, a lip-syncing video-sharing app co-founded by civil engineer Alex Zhu. Bought by ByteDance and renamed TikTok in 2018, it gained an algorithm that served users an addictive menu.
There are some touching stories about the emotions excited by TikTok. Present at the world’s biggest online video conference, in London in 2019, the author writes: “The toughest line of questioning at the TikTok session comes from a cherubic child who asks her idols what they do if they laugh mid-way through recording a video”. He notes the fear psychosis that governs the West’s attitude to TikTok because of its full transition “from a lip-syncing lark to a media titan” but argues against banning a digital product just because you don’t like where it originates.
Choice quote:
“YouTube attained two billion monthly active users after 15 years of existence, and Facebook took 13 years. If TikTok keeps its current trajectory, it will probably reach that level in a quarter of the time”.
A Girl in Exile: Requiem for Linda B.
By: Ismail Kadare
Publisher: Counterpoint
Year: First published in English in 2016
This novel, by the late great Albanian writer6 Ismail Kadare, is not about social media but it is about social control and the mad desires that can be sparked by another viral visual medium, television. The dictatorial one-party state and its security apparatus tries to control the mind (as well as the body) of Linda B, but she defiantly falls in love with a man she has only ever seen on television, Albanian playwright Rudian Stefa.
The novel starts with Stefa summoned to appear before the Party Committee. He thinks they may be objecting to his new play or looking into some complaint by his young girlfriend Migena. But at the Party office he is questioned about Linda B, who had committed suicide holding a book Stefa had inscribed to her. He explains that he wrote the dedication at Migena’s request.
The story becomes darker as Stefa gets obsessed with finding out the real reasons for the girl’s death. Meanwhile, memories and myths converge to illustrate the role of imagination in a totalitarian state. Poignantly, Kadare dedicates the novel to “the young Albanian women who were born, grew up and spent their youth in internal exile”.
Though this novel was originally published in 2009 in Albanian, the story seems to start out in the early 1980s, when Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha was alive.
Choice quote:
“Orpheus [had made] an adjustment to his lyre, increasing the number of strings from seven to nine...We all love Orpheus, Zeus had supposedly said, but still we can’t permit him things we don’t allow anybody else…Perhaps I have old-fashioned tastes, but I think all our ears are accustomed to the old seven-stringed lyre...There were shouts for and against. Leave the artists to their work…Zeus…postponed any decision. He was apparently aware of something the others were not. As always, Rudian Stefa said to himself. Every tyrant has special knowledge”.
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ByteDance website on where it’s located.
Joanne E. Gray. ‘The geopolitics of ‘platforms’: the TikTok challenge’. Internet Policy Review, 2021.
A social media user’s acerbic commentary on TikTok and X joining hands:
As of this year, Senegalese-Italian influencer Khabane " Khaby " Lame is the most-followed user on TikTok.
Thanks for this Rashmee. I hadn't read this novel by Kadare. Your post made me want to. The phrase "internal exile" originally coined for Nazi Germany, is relevant to life under all tyrannies.