The Economics of TikTok

As many of you know, TikTok has been in the news as of late due to being a possible security risk and has been threatened to be banned, due to it's Chinese origin. TikTok was originally called Musical.y, and is owned by ByteDance, but due to the current fate of the app, it may be sold to an American company in order to keep it from being banned. I did use Musical.y for a little bit while it was still popular, around when I was 13, but now it has reemerged in popularity after being renamed TikTok. As for being censored, TikTok tends to "shadowban" people, which means that a creator may not be getting their content out to their followers according to the algorithm if that creator spoke about a topic that is sensitive or even violated it's community guidelines. I have witnessed creators being shadowbanned and if the creator is known to speak loudly about "controversial" topics, this gives TikTok a bad reputation.