Every Screen on the Planet

The Secret Story of TikTok

De: Emily Baker-White

Narrado por: Rachel Botchan

'A must-read account from a heroic reporter who has taken on the world's most dangerous tech company' – Chris Miller, award-winning author of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

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.

Every Screen on the Planet is the dramatic, untold story of TikTok. Charting its rise from obscurity into the world’s most valuable startup, Emily Baker-White relates how its 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.

'Revealing. A story about power, control and the hidden battles shaping what we see online' – Parmy Olson, bestselling author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World

(P)2025 Recorded Books

Reseñas de la Crítica

Is TikTok spying on you? It already has spied on Emily Baker-White, in the course of her pathbreaking research into the company's out-of-control surveillance and its legal subjugation to Beijing's spymasters. Deeply researched and nuanced in its judgments, this is a must-read account from a heroic reporter who has taken on the world's most dangerous tech company (Chris Miller, bestselling author of Chip War)

Revealing. A story about power, control and the hidden battles shaping what we see online. A smart and surprisingly deep dive that will make you rethink what's going on behind TikTok's endless scroll. (Parmy Olson, bestselling author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World)