You may not know Jorge Reyes, but if you're in Latin America and you're using TikTok, you've seen his work.

His choices had a sort of spillover effect into what users saw, what users sought out what users were liking.

That's Emily Baker-White. She's a senior writer at Forbes and the author of

every screen on the planet, The War Over TikTok, which just came out this week. In her book,

Emily describes the early days of Bite Dance, the company that would go on to own TikTok.

In 2018, ByteDance hired a small team of content creators and sent them to Mexico City

to try to figure out how to appeal to the kids of Latin America, Mexico, and Spain.

Bite Dance says, all right, what we need is some people to tell us what's cool.

Tell us what's funny.

Tell us what's trending.

And so they hire a bunch of 20-something, cool kids who know how the internet works to tell them what their algorithm should be showing people.

One of those cool 20-somethings was Jorge.

The earliest people who served as for content curators for bite dance, they were making

decisions about what to show people in the moment, but their decisions also trickled down

to show the company and show the algorithm that

now, you know, runs TikTok what works. Algorithms are just an amalgamation of decisions that are

encoded by people, right? And so those curatorial decisions early on were really important in TikTok and ByteDance figuring out what they wanted to show people not just that day or that week, but moving forward in the long run.

Late last month, President Trump announced that his administration had made a deal to keep TikTok in the U.S.

The plan is for a new joint venture company to oversee the American version of the app.

One of the main investors?

Oracle's Larry Ellison, a conservative billionaire and Trump ally.

China has not approved the deal, and besides the question of who owns it, the details are pretty murky,

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