LISTEN CLOSELY and you can hear the influencers wail. On March 13th America’s House of Representatives passed a bill barring app stores and internet providers from distributing “foreign-adversary-controlled applications”. The target is clear: TikTok, a hit short-video app to which 170m Americans are glued for an average of 56 minutes a day.
TikTok’s position in America has long been precarious. Although the firm is based in Los Angeles and Singapore, it is a subsidiary of ByteDance, a Chinese tech outfit. That has fed bipartisan fears that the Chinese government could use it to spy on American citizens or shape public opinion. TikTok has
