Trump is still TikTok’s X factor
TikTok remains online in the US, thanks to a reprieve granted by Donald Trump who’s even floated the idea of the American American government taking a stake in the popular video platform. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on the pull of social media, among other sorts of mind control. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
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The Big Story:
TikTok was to be shut down in the US the day before Donald Trump took office on Jan 20 while Albania started 2025 with its government vowing to ban the world’s most downloaded social media app.
Both countries have invoked TikTok as something to be feared, albeit in different ways…
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…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”…
- The site is banned outright in several countries…
- 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”…
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…Even so, this is a good narrative on TikTok’s relatively quiet beginnings…It started as Musical.ly…
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…”
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 writer 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…
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
(PS: I recently visited Albania and wrote about it here, here, here, here, here and here.)
