TikTok is the social media sensation that all of Silicon Valley — and a lot of Washington, DC — has their eyes on. The app, created by ByteDance, became famous for rocketing musicians and dancers to stardom. But as its popularity and influence have grown, so has scrutiny of its privacy policies, security, and influence, with legislators voicing concern about its ownership by a Chinese firm. Meanwhile, social media competitors are doing everything they can to knock off TikTok’s features and usurp its short-form video dominance.
Executive agencies including the Department of Labor and Department of Transportation are joining the app once declared a national security threat. Following the close of the deal to bring TikTok US under a US entity, the Justice Department said government employees are free to download it.
According to Reuters, the DOJ has issued a memo stating that “employees of Executive Branch agencies may download TikTok onto their official devices, subject to the agency’s discretion,” now that the deal limiting ByteDance’s ownership is in place and US user data is secured in American data centers.
UK communications regulator Ofcom has opened an investigation to assess whether TikTok is complying with Online Safety Act duties to prevent children from seeing harmful content. The probe will also examine the effectiveness of TikTok’s age assurance systems. An update is expected in October 2026.
The platform is testing improvements to its spam detection system to help identify accounts posting AI-generated spam related to politics, current events, financial advice, medical information, and other topics that could “pose a risk to public trust or well-being.”
TikTok is also joining the C2PA Steering Committee.
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how course-peddling hustlebros manage to convince their followers that they’re selling enough subscriptions to galavant around the world in private jets, you need to check out this excellent 404 piece that highlights one of the trade’s shadiest tricks: fake dashboards.
Internal documents, which were disclosed as part of a wave of child safety lawsuits filed by school districts across the US, showed:
Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms.
Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school.
TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.
Can race, guilt, and empathy get you to pay $40 for this $9 belt buckle on TikTok?
Randomized trial results of the experimental GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon drug shows that it may be too effective, while causing a whopping 11% of participants at the highest dose to drop out because of the severity of the side effects. In Optimizer, Victoria Song covered TikTok influencers pushing grey market knockoffs of “Ratatouille” and attempted to find out what was actually in them. (Please don’t buy shady “Retatrutide” from the internet.)
Starting today, US users will be able to book hotels, tours, and ticketed experiences directly in the app. Travel content is a major category on the platform, so it makes sense for TikTok to want a hand in the actual booking process, not just discovery. Content creators will also be able to earn commissions from reservations made through their content.
A TikTok spokesperson tells Business Insider that the feature will now identify products in a video, instead of attempting to summarize what happens in it.
Users have reported some wildly inaccurate AI video descriptions, like one that described Charli D’Amelio as a “collection of various blueberries with different toppings,” according to Business Insider.
Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) have written a letter to TikTok USDS CEO Adam Presser, urging the platform to estimate users’ age using their account activity or require parents to confirm their child’s age. The lawmakers also suggest that TikTok works with OS-makers like Apple and Google to implement age verification:
For example, if a user is designated as a child in their iCloud account, meaning they are under 13, Apple could share that information with TikTok and the user therefore would not be able to create a TikTok account.
Correction, April 22nd: The name is Josh Gottheimer, not John.
Explosive Media is going up against the White House in a meme war.
TikTok star Khaby Lame sold his personal brand to a small, relatively unknown company called “Rich Sparkle Holdings.” Instead of handing him $975 million in cash, they paid him in stock. Fans piled in, causing the price to skyrocket, briefly making Lame a paper billionaire (several times over) before the price plummeted. It’s now looking suspiciously like a “pump-and-dump” scheme, causing trading apps to freeze the stock. 🤷♂️
The decision reverses a 2024 order for TikTok to shut down its operations in the country, and comes after an agreement that TikTok will implement “enhanced protection” for Canadians’ personal information.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which previously warned against using TikTok, said Canadians should “proceed cautiously” when joining new platforms and “conduct their own research on the type of data being collected,” CTV News reports.
The old sport is going all-in on chasing virality.
A new Sensor Tower report suggests the USDS takeover managed to retain most of its users despite a bumpy start and concerns with the new owners:
The average number of TikTok’s daily active users in the US remains around 95% of its usership compared to the week of Jan. 19-25.
We can confirm that basic features in the US do seem to work reliably now on the new Trump-friendly entity’s servers, even if the algorithm still seems a little wonky at times. Per TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC:
We have successfully restored TikTok back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary US data center site operated by Oracle. The winter storm led to a power outage which caused network and storage issues at the site and impacted tens of thousands of servers that help keep TikTok running in the US.
Great, but how many of ya’ll have abandoned the platform?
Without explaining why its cloud status page doesn’t list any outages, TikTok USDS part-owner Oracle outed itself as the previously unnamed “US data center partner” that experienced a power outage over the weekend, blocking videos from publishing and unraveling its all-important algorithm for a few days.
Michael Egbert, Oracle Spokesperson:
Over the weekend, an Oracle data center experienced a temporary weather-related power outage which impacted TikTok. The challenges U.S. TikTok users may be experiencing are the result of technical issues that followed the power outage, which Oracle and TikTok are working to quickly resolve.
