Hi everybody, I'm Brittany Lewis, a reporter here at Forbes.

Joining me now is my Forbes colleague, Emily Baker-White.

Emily, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks so much for having me.

On this election day, you have a very relevant story about the battle over how much politics to allow on TikTok.

So talk to us about the internal battle, first of all, on the colleagues in TikTok talking about

whether they should ban politics, what the political discourse on the apps would look like.

Yeah, so TikTok has a long history of ambivalence and nervousness about politics.

They used to call themselves the last sunny place on the internet.

They really wanted to sort of be a politics-free zone as best they could.

And in part, that's because TikTok is owned by a Chinese parent company.

And so if there's even a shred of doubt about whether TikTok might be putting its thumb on the

scale in favor of one candidate or against another candidate, that would make people really

uncomfortable. And so the company's stance from from here on, you know, from from their

founding has sort of been to avoid politics as best they can. But as TikTok has gotten bigger,

it is as we all know impossible to avoid politics these days. And it's especially impossible

to avoid politics when you have 170 million Americans on your platform.

That is more people than voted for Trump and Biden in 2020.

It is a huge number of people, and they are having this conversation on TikTok.

And so some people at TikTok have said, let's lean into it.

It gets clicks.

It keeps people on the app it makes money

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