When the Supreme Court upheld a law that banned TikTok from the US, it seemed well aware that its ruling could resonate far beyond one app. The justices delivered an unsigned opinion with a quote from Justice Felix Frankfurter from 1944: “in considering the application of established legal rules to the ‘totally new problems’ raised by the airplane and radio,

There's a code phrase on TikTok called "cute winter boots," but what does it mean and why are users making videos about it?

In a historic development, Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok has become the center of a bipartisan bill to ban the app nationwide in the name of national security. Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a prominent scholar in the study of state censorship,

U.S. TikTok servers went down for roughly 12 hours over the weekend, starting on the night of January 18. American users are now reporting a spike in censorship of political commentary and criticism since the app has been back up and running in the States,

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok’s CEO Shou ZI Chew both attended the inauguration, alongside former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the first tech boss to hitch his wagon to Trump.

President Donald Trump's flurry of day-one actions included a reprieve for TikTok, the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an order on social media "censorship," a declaration of an energy emergency, and reversal of a Biden order on artificial intelligence.

Users looking for a TikTok alternative learn about daily life in China, but some posts are taboo.

As self-described " TikTok refugees" pour onto the Chinese social media app RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, some foreign netizens are already running up against the country's extensive censorship apparatus. Newsweek reached out to Xiaohongshu with a request for comment via a general contact email address.

TikTok isn’t the villain here. It’s a symptom of a much larger issue: the lack of clear, enforceable rules for data privacy and security. Instead of banning the app, the government should focus on fixing the system.

China’s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing.

Millions are turning to RedNote, a Chinese social media app, as its resemblance to TikTok appeals to users. But dig a little deeper, and the reality becomes far more insidious.