Every Screen on the Planet

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. This is the dramatic, untold story of TikTok. 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. 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. Based on unprecedented access to internal documents, leaked recordings and accounts from whistle-blowers inside the company, Every Screen on the Planet 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.