When Tik Tok arrived in the United States in 2017, it was framed as a harmless cultural export: a platform for dances, jokes, and viral creativity. But for anyone who had seen China’s surveillance state up close, its arrival felt ominous. Tik Tok is owned by ByteDance, a company deeply entangled with the Chinese Communist Party’s system of mass surveillance—one that has enabled the detention of up to 1.8 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang. While the West debates whether concerns about Tik Tok amount to xenophobia, the app has already played a quieter role: suppressing information about a genocide, normalizing authoritarian power, and testing how easily human rights abuses can be made invisible in plain sight.