The TikTok Teens Go To Washington
TikTok videos underscore the gap in expertise between those who seek to regulate technology and those who use it. If you were wondering if the teens of TikTok saw Congress’s hearing about the platform last week: They did. They saw it through TikTok Lives, with their favorite creators talking about it. They saw snippets of the hearing through news channels on TikTok (even CSPAN). They saw it via memes and edits of members of Congress asking if TikTok could “turn on their wifi” and if the app collected data about their “pupil dilation” to know what to “amplify.” Within an hour, those snippets had become so prevalent on the app that one set of creators made a video in which they repeated the silliest questions from Congress in the format of a military recitation. In a softer aesthetic, one creator made a song that played over a video of her standing below a mountain; it began “TikTok don’t want your pupils” and ended “Are we going to lose our app because peepaw thinks China wants to...
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