Every Screen on the Planet

TikTok and its global reach are at the heart of this dramatic, meticulously reported account. Every Screen on the Planet delves into the rise of the app, its influence on how we discover and share content, and the high-stakes clash between its ambitions and concerns about surveillance, censorship, and manipulation. Based on unprecedented access to internal documents, leaked recordings and whistle-blower testimony, the book follows ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming and the company’s trajectory from relative obscurity to a globally valuable startup, while revealing how a powerful recommendation algorithm shapes what we see online. The work places the story against the backdrop of tensions between two superpowers, exploring the forces that compete for control over a platform that commands attention on more than a billion screens worldwide.

Written by Emily Baker-White, a Harvard-trained lawyer and investigative journalist, the narrative combines legal insight with on-the-ground reporting to illuminate how attention became a commodity—and why that matters for users, societies and the internet’s future. The book has been described as revealing power struggles that shape what we see online, and it presents a careful, critical look at the real-world implications of a platform that sits at the center of global discourse.

Features

• Rise from obscurity to the world’s most valuable startup
• Explores surveillance, censorship, user manipulation
• Internal documents, leaked recordings, whistle-blower accounts
• Focus on Zhang Yiming and ByteDance’s global impact
• Two superpowers backdrop shaping TikTok’s fate
• 368 pages, paperback edition