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1.5 billion people watch. zero sustainability reports published. we read the label anyway.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a privately held Chinese technology company founded in 2012. ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing, with TikTok's operational headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles.
As of 2024, TikTok had over 1.5 billion monthly active users. ByteDance's internal valuation has been estimated at around $300 billion, making it the most valuable private company in the world. TikTok's advertising revenue alone was estimated at $23 billion in 2024.
The company has never gone public. It has no independent board. Its ownership structure runs through a web of Cayman Islands holding entities that make a full shareholder map genuinely difficult to trace.
TikTok's creator economy is real. The platform has paid out over $1 billion through its Creator Fund since launch. A 2023 Oxford Economics study estimated the platform contributed $24.2 billion to US GDP and supported 224,000 jobs.
BookTok has been credited with driving a measurable increase in book sales. Small bakeries, bookshops, independent perfumers who went from zero to fully booked off a single video. Those are real positives. They're also the exact positives that make the next sections harder to sit with.
TikTok's privacy policy describes one of the most comprehensive data collection regimes of any consumer app: device identifiers, browsing history, clipboard contents, keystroke patterns, faceprints and voiceprints, GPS location, and inferences about your age, gender, and interests. It tracks how long you watch each video, where you pause, what you rewatch, and what you skip.
In 2023, ByteDance admitted that employees had accessed the data of US journalists to track internal leaks. The employees were fired. The admission confirmed what privacy researchers had warned about.
TikTok has never published a sustainability report. No carbon footprint. No Scope 1, 2, or 3 emissions disclosure. No net-zero commitment. No renewable energy targets. Nothing.
Researchers at The Shift Project estimated online video streaming generates approximately 300 million tonnes of CO2 annually. TikTok serves over 1 billion videos per day, and its algorithm is specifically designed to maximise watch time, meaning it's optimised to increase energy consumption by design.
TikTok's recommendation algorithm optimises for a metric ByteDance internally calls "time spent". The full-screen format eliminates distractions. Autoplay removes choice friction. Infinite scroll has no natural stopping point.
A 2024 study presented to the US Congress found 1 in 3 teens reported using TikTok "almost constantly." The American Psychological Association issued an advisory in 2023 warning that algorithmically curated feeds were associated with increased anxiety, depression, and body image issues in adolescents.
Australia's Online Safety Amendment Act 2024 set a minimum age of 16 for social media access, with TikTok explicitly in scope.
The original Creator Fund paid creators $0.02 to $0.04 per 1,000 views. A video with a million views might earn $20-40. TikTok generated $23 billion in ad revenue in 2024. The Creator Fund paid out roughly $1 billion total across its entire existence.
TikTok is private, so you can't buy its shares directly. But the companies that power TikTok's infrastructure are publicly listed and almost certainly in your super fund. You hold Oracle, which hosts TikTok's US data. You hold Nvidia, whose GPUs train the recommendation algorithm. You're not invested in TikTok. You're invested in the infrastructure that makes TikTok possible.
Default investing means you don't choose what you own. The index doesn't ask whether the company publishes a sustainability report, or whether its algorithm maximises compulsive usage in teenagers. The index doesn't have an opinion. It just holds everything.
inaam exists for the people who want to know what they hold. Not to tell you TikTok is bad. But to make sure that when you invest, you've read the fine print.
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