"The pre-TikTok era of social media was a genuine, full-spectrum privacy disaster. It was, however..."

"... a disaster constructed by domestic companies and exported to the rest of the world (although notably not to China). Digital privacy is a notoriously difficult concept around which to mobilize politically. Nationalism, less so. With TikTok at the center of the discourse, we can expect to encounter the former through the distorting lens of the latter with the help of politicians who, despite a prior blindness to matters of privacy, will have a point.... TikTok is a platform of targeted content and loose ties — a post-social social network that doesn’t rely on your friends to keep you engaged and entertained but rather on 'recommendation,' which is the flip side of surveillance.... Compared to Facebook’s rise, TikTok’s was dazzling but impersonal, the product of a supreme emphasis on content over connections, on breaking out of networks rather than formalizing them. Users’ sense of obligation to one another, though, is what bought Facebook more time at the top. To quit Facebook, however little one uses it, is to sever some sort of contact, and to leave Instagram, however dull it has become, is to know a little less about your friends. A bored or restless TikTok user, however, can simply watch less — only TikTok will notice they’re gone."

From "TikTok Is the New King of Social Media. Now What?" (NY Magazine).