We are in the midst of a phone addiction pandemic, and addictive design elements are among its main causes. Many actors and structures must be held accountable, but we must not overlook a distinctive pattern among some popular apps today: certain Chinese-made platforms and apps - such as TikTok, SHEIN, Temu, mushrooming micro-drama apps, and mobile gam(bl)ing apps - face heavy restrictions and regulation in their domestic market, yet are exported abroad in their most harmful forms. This pattern makes the nineteenth-century Opium Wars an irresistible historical comparison.
This op-ed is written by media researcher Serkan Kasapoglu and is part of a series that brings together cultural, historical and geopolitical context to offer a new perspective on TikTok's disproportionate contribution to phone addiction.
Part 1: Douyin and TikTok, its evil twin
The letter
I would like to begin by taking you back to the events leading up to the First Opium War (1839–1842).
In 1839, Lin Zexu, the imperial commissioner in Canton, sat down to write a letter to Britain’s twenty-year-old Queen Victoria:
I have heard that you strictly prohibit opium in your own country, indicating unmistakably that you know how harmful opium is. You do not wish opium to harm your own country, but you choose to bring that harm to other countries such as China. Why? The products that originate from China are all useful items. They are good for food and other purposes and are easy to sell. Has China produced one item that is harmful to foreign countries?
— Lin Zexu to Queen Victoria, 1839
Lin’s argument was that Britain knew opium was harmful and had organised its domestic affairs accordingly, while British merchants continued to smuggle tens of thousands of chests of the drug into the Chinese market each year, despite its illegality there. Britain, in other words, applied one standard to its own population and another to populations abroad.
The First Opium War resulted in British forces occupying Hong Kong, an important trading hub. At its heart, the conflict was about the right to sell: whether a sovereign state could decide what crossed its borders and entered the lives of its people. Britain’s position was that China could not exercise that right against British commercial interests; China’s was that it could. In a sense, the war helped determine which of these principles would shape the century that followed.
Today, however, the tables have turned. Western governments increasingly assert sovereignty over consumption, arguing that a state may determine what enters its citizens’ attention and that a foreign company’s commercial rights carry less weight than public health. Beijing, meanwhile, invokes the principles of open markets and non-discrimination, arguing against singling out a company on the basis of its nationality.
In the United States, the first major attempt to restrict TikTok came in August 2020, but legislative action did not follow until 2024. Even then, the resulting Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act focused primarily on foreign adversary control and the associated national-security risks, particularly those involving data collection and access. It did not directly address the platform’s potentially addictive design features.
In 1839, Lin Zexu at least recognised the dangers of widespread opium addiction, even though he could not prevent the harm from spreading, and China continued to grapple with the consequences of opium use for 150-200 years.
The sterile fortress
In recent years, Beijing has aggressively sought to curb phone addiction while tightening control over information, expression, and dissent:
- Douyin, TikTok's China version, introduced a teen mode in 2018: a forty-minute daily cap, a curfew between 22:00 and 06:00, and a whitelist rather than a feed. From 2021 it became mandatory for users under fourteen, enforced through real-name registration rather than a self-declared birthday.
- In March 2022, rules on algorithmic recommendation took effect requiring platforms to register their algorithms with the state and to offer users a way to switch personalization off.
- In April 2025, a nationwide minor mode went live, delivering to twelve-to-sixteen-year-olds news "adapted to cognitive development" and material that promotes core socialist values.
These do look like enviable public health achievements, but some others reveal an unwavering propaganda and censorship machine:
- prescribing ideologies and algorithms and filtering out anything that challenges the Communist Party's authority,
- any criticism or mockery of Xi Jinping,
- references to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown,
- support for Taiwanese, Tibetan or Uyghur self-determination,
- Falun Gong,
- organized protest,
- much LGBTQ+ advocacy,
- celebrity/idol culture,
- and Western platforms such as Google, YouTube, Instagram and X, which are blocked outright.
What about its exports?
The popular formulation of this op-ed's thesis belongs to Tristan Harris: “It's almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids' development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.”
Four months after this formulation, CEO of TikTok was heard by the U.S. congress. Two weeks before the March 23rd 2023 hearing with the CEO of TikTok (full transcript), Zeyi Yang, a reporter on China’s scientific advancements, attributed the divergence to Beijing's regulatory system: Douyin is also a commercial short-video app, engineered by the same firm with the same engagement and profit-making objectives, and full of the same disposable material, except for the aforementioned. The teen mode is a walled compartment inside it and the divergence between the two apps is downstream of state regulatory pressure. So, ByteDance built a spinach compartment because the state required one, and did not build it elsewhere because nowhere else required it.
In 2023, when the U.S. Supreme Court rested its judgment on data collection and declining to rest it on addictive design, the company argued about the database, and the Congress legislated about the database, and the Court ruled on the database - while addictive design is always overlooked. Because, again, the constitutional order forbids that argument. U.S. saw it as free market economy and freedom of expression.
In fact, neither Beijing nor ByteDance invented the mechanics that made TikTok’s addictive design possible. Facebook’s News Feed replaced the profile visit in 2006, to loud protest from its users. Infinite scroll was written the same year by Aza Raskin, an American, who has spent the years since apologizing for it and called by some a “digital Oppenheimer.” Variable-ratio reward came into Silicon Valley long before ByteDance existed. Recommendation was not the first neither: Last.fm matched listeners with statistically similar strangers, and Spotify’s Discover Weekly turned the same logic into its playlist system. Even the six-second looping video was Vine’s, launched by Twitter in 2013, three years before Douyin.
Then why, exactly, is TikTok the evil twin?
Because it swapped the social graph for the interest graph, and it did it with video. Before TikTok, the feed was not as addictive as it is today. It did not refresh faster than the user deliberated. You had to seek out content yourself, by following friends, celebrities or hashtags. TikTok’s For You Page needs none of that. Short, full-screen clips autoplay one at a time, and every swipe, pause and rewatch is read by the algorithms as a signal. The system learns your taste within seconds, without you following anyone or searching for anything. Your interests are no longer expressed but inferred, without your real consent, and the next clip arrives before you have decided anything about the last. Nobody has to be that resilient. The user expresses nothing and is read anyway. Whatever little was still social about social media ended with this transition. This algorithmic, hyper-personalized feed of TikTok is the crown jewel of social media's addictive design. Its engine was perfected with Tiktok, even though it was built initially for another product of the same company, the news aggregator Toutiao, launched in 2012, ByteDance's first product.
What TikTok did, then, was industrialize and monetize the system, but especially for export. The export is the crux of the issue. This is partly because the same design is increasingly restricted in China’s domestic market for its toxicity. But it is mainly because what crossed the border was not a product but a standard. Within months of TikTok’s breakout in the West, Instagram launched Reels and YouTube launched Shorts. Beijing did not ask them to. They had to, because a format China restricts at home (or is about to) outcompeted theirs, and copying it was the only way for the capitalist to survive. And within months of American companies adapting to these new addictive trends, first documented link between ByteDance and the Chinese state occured. In 2021 a state-backed entity took a 1% “golden share” and a board seat in ByteDance’s main Beijing subsidiary. The American adoption of TikTok's addictive design elements is how China, willingly or not, hit the U.S. with its own weapon: capitalism. Meta and Google became the distributors of a Chinese-perfected addictive design standard. They carried it to populations that TikTok, Chinese entrepreneurs, or Beijing had not yet reached, and perhaps never would have. Are they CCP agents without even realizing it?
And, back to nineteenth century: In the 1830s, British opium moved into China through Chinese middlemen who took the margin. Today the format moves into the West through Western firms to increase profit, who now lobby against the rules that would constrain it. Has the incentive already did its work?
But Europe is (finally) waking up - or is it?
On 19 November 2025, Macron gives a newspaper interview arguing that China exports entertainment to European children while keeping education for its own, and calls it a cognitive war. A week later, Euronews runs a fact check on the President and says Macron is “partially accurate.”
In February 2026, the European Commission issued preliminary findings that TikTok's design breaches the DSA, naming infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications and the rabbit-hole recommender, and indicating that compliance would require the company to disable those features and rebuild its recommender for European users. The remedy Brussels is (finally) demanding is, functionally, the settlement the sterile fortress already imposed on Douyin - time limits that cannot be dismissed, a recommender the state can inspect, a feed with brakes - except for the “really bads.” Are they effective in China? That's the topic of another discussion. This study preferred to focus on state-platform relationships; now, European legislators are finally asking a Chinese firm to apply Beijing's “good” standards to Europeans, too. Will they manage? And is the damage of all these years still reversible, or have we already lost a generation?
