Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Happy New Year, everybody! I hope your re-entry into working life went reasonably smoothly. 2020 is shaping up to a big year for this newsletter: it will see the most critical election of my lifetime, three hotly anticipated books about Facebook; and several live events where you’ll be able to talk about it with me and Zoe in person. Thanks for reading, and as always, keep those smart replies coming.
In November, we talked here about how some of the threats against TikTok were starting to add up. National security officials had begun to investigate the Chinese looping video app as a potential national security threat. Meanwhile, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States launched an inquiry into whether TikTok’s owner,…