TikTok made us better? Or much, much worse?

The government’s ostensible reasoning for all of this complicated, confusing, and extremely showboat-y hubbub, which included last week’s hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew, is national security. A large and bipartisan swath of Congress is concerned that because ByteDance is based in China, the Chinese government could access American users’ data and push or suppress certain kinds of content to Americans.

Judging by many of the questions asked by congresspeople (one wondered if TikTok had access to his “home WiFi network”), officials barely seem to grasp what TikTok is, framing it as either single-handedly responsible for all the mischief kids get up to online or as a Chinese psy-op.

While these concerns are not exactly throwaways, they don’t address the more existential question of TikTok’s five-year presence on Americans’ phones (more than 150 million of them!): Is TikTok a force for good? What even is “good” on the internet? Can a social platform ever aspire to be it, much less embody it?

TikTok is inherently different from Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, BeReal (at least the people), or any of the other social apps begging for our attention. What do we lose if we lose TikTok? I’m not talking so much about the people whose livelihoods are tied up in it — those people will surely lose business and clout, but many of them will or already have pivoted to other platforms.