Every Screen on the Planet

<p><b>'A must-read account from a heroic reporter who has taken on the world's most dangerous tech company' – Chris Miller, award-winning author of <i>Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology</i><br><br>'Engaging . . . this excellent book lays out the damage of letting arbitrary political power intervene in business' – <i>Financial Times</i><br><br>It’s on your phone. It’s on your children’s phones. It’s on more than a billion screens across the planet, serving up joy, creativity and connection. But behind the slick feed of the world’s most addictive app lies ruthless ambition and a global war for control.</b><br><br><b>This is the dramatic, untold story of TikTok.</b><br><br>Charting its rise from obscurity into the world’s most valuable startup, Emily Baker-White reveals how TikTok's visionary founder, ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming, reshaped the global internet from a place where you searched for information to one where information comes to you. Billions of users were soon hooked by the most effective recommendation algorithm in the world.<br><br>But there was a cost to such success. Soon, TikTok was embroiled in accusations of surveillance, censorship and user manipulation, attracting controversy from India and Europe to the US. After Baker-White – a Harvard-trained lawyer and investigative reporter – revealed that Chinese engineers could access Americans’ private information, a team of ByteDance employees even used the app to track her location.<br><br>Based on unprecedented access to internal documents, leaked recordings and accounts from whistle-blowers inside the company, <i>Every Screen on the Planet</i> reveals how TikTok became trapped between two superpowers, desperate to survive. It is the story of how your attention became the world’s mo­­­­st valuable – and dangerous – commodity.<br><br><b>'Revealing. A story about power, control and the hidden battles shaping what we see online' – Parmy Olson, bestselling author of <i>Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World</i></b></p>