This piece was originally published in the Burner Files.

In a line from the cartoon Futurama that later became a viral meme, Hermes won a promotion to a grade 37 bureaucrat for uncovering a form that had been incorrectly stamped only four times. The head bureaucrat said, “You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.”

When it comes to TikTok, though, being technically correct is often the opposite: the worst kind of correct.

Many people think that TikTok is just a social media app where people post dancing videos. TikTok uses that marketing strategy to portray themselves as a benign app and deflect criticism, but as a former software engineer from Google, I’m not the type to be easily fooled by savvy marketing. If you look below the surface, you will find that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is a Chinese company with strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party. And the deeper you dig, the worse it gets.

Click here to read the full piece in the Burner Files.