Let’s start with TikTok in 2023. In January, Statista estimated that the number of global users was 834 million, with women making up the dominant percentage of the platform’s audience across all age groups, with 18 to 24, predictably, being the largest. According to TikTok, in 2021, it had a billion users and other platforms put the numbers of people active on TikTok somewhere between the two. And the truth? As Fox Mulder would say – it’s out there.

There was also the revelation in December 2022 that TikTok was spying on its users. The company admitted that four employees from ByteDance, now dismissed, had been spying on reporters, among them a former Buzzfeed reporter, and a reporter from the Financial Times, using location data – a confession that has shaken up so much dust between the US administration and the social media platform that it’s hard to see what the fallout will be. At a congressional grilling on March 22 this year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said that the company would never share data with the Chinese government, but this has done little to calm nerves.