Early morning

It being rather early on Friday morning, I thought I would take a look at the New York Times, an online newspaper to which I pay a modest subscription, but have not actually looked at for some weeks.

From where I got to reference 1, all about TikTok, an app of which I am dimly aware but which I have never knowingly used -  but it seems that near 200 million people in the US do - and they can't all be children. The US is set to ban it in days, it being OK for Musk to own a social media platform - but not someone from China. A ban which, it seems, will mean that the app is removed from the Google and Apple app stores. What else it will mean in the free world is less clear.

From where Bing fairly rapidly led me to a sensible article at reference 2.

And from there to reference 3, which I have not read, beyond noting that the subject is one Johann Hari, a clever expatriate from Glasgow, the author of several best sellers, one of which is advertised above. At which point I started worrying about my own attention span and decided to call it a day.

I have also decided that banning TikTok is a rather crude response to a real problem. But it remains a product which I have not used.

PS 1: the basic TikTok format seems to be a short video clip rather than a short bit of text , what used to be called a tweet. With plenty of help provided to help you create click-catching footage. Said to be very addictive.

PS 2: a last word... It now seems that Hari is rather controversial as well as clever. See reference 4.

References

Reference 1: For TikTok Refugees, a Wry Welcome on a Chinese App: In their mass migration to the Chinese app RedNote, social media users make a gleeful mockery of the American government - Amanda Hess, New York Times - 2025.

Reference 2: Has TikTok made us better? Or much, much worse: The case for and against TikTok as a cultural force - Rebecca Jennings, Vox - 2025. To be found at https://www.vox.com/culture/23660355/tiktok-ban-cultural-impact.

Reference 3: How Capitalism Is Killing Our Attention Spans: Johann Hari, author of ‘Stolen Focus,’ discusses the many ways in which tech companies are siphoning our attention for profit - Current Affairs - 2025. To be found at https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/03/how-capitalism-is-killing-our-attention-spans.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari.