Why TikTok’s first week of American ownership was a disaster

App endured a major outage and user backlash over perceived censorship. Now it’s facing an inquiry by the California governor and an ascendant competitor

A little more than one week ago, TikTok stepped on to US shores as a naturalized citizen. Ever since, the video app has been fighting for its life.

TikTok’s calamitous emigration began on 22 January when its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, finalized a deal to sell the app to a group of US investors, among them the business software giant Oracle. The app’s time under Chinese ownership had been marked by a meteoric ascent to more than a billion users, which left incumbents such as Instagram looking like the next Myspace. But TikTok’s short new life in the US has been less than auspicious.

Published: February 1, 2026, 11:00 am

How the left can win back the internet – and rise again | Robert Topinka

In the final part of this series, we look at how infighting has ripped the left apart online while the right has flourished – and how some progressives are turning the tide

• Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

• Part one: How liberals lost the internet

• Part two: How the right won the internet

There is politics before the internet, and politics after the internet. Liberals are floundering, the right are flourishing, and what of the left? Well, it’s in a dire state. This is despite the fact that the key political problems of the last decade – rising inequality and a cost of living crisis – are problems leftists claim they can solve. The trouble is, reactionaries and rightwingers steal their thunder online, quickly spreading messaging that blames scapegoats for structural problems. One reason for this is that platforms originally built to connect us with friends and followers now funnel us content designed to provoke emotional engagement.

Back when Twitter was still the “town square” and Facebook a humble “social network”, progressives had an advantage: from the Arab spring to Occupy Wall Street, voices excluded from mainstream media and politics could leverage online social networks and turn them into real-life ones, which at their most potent became street-level protests that toppled regimes and held capitalism to account. It seemed as though the scattered masses would become a networked collective empowered to rise up against the powerful.

Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

Published: February 1, 2026, 8:00 am

‘It’s really sad’: US TikTok users rethink app over concerns about privacy and censorship

Some users are stepping away from the app after it made a deal to create a US entity and updated terms and conditions

Many TikTok users across the US say they’re rethinking their relationship with the platform since its ownership and terms and conditions have recently changed, with some citing censorship and lack of trust as reasons why they’re removing themselves from the app.

Keara Sullivan, a 26-year-old comedian, says TikTok jumpstarted her career and provided a pathway to getting a manager and a literary agent.

Published: February 1, 2026, 5:00 pm

‘Coffee is just the excuse’: the deaf-run cafe where hearing people sign to order

In-person interactions break down barriers in east London, as AI startups also try to bridge communication divide

Wesley Hartwell raised his fists to the barista and shook them next to his ears. He then lowered his fists, extended his thumbs and little fingers, and moved them up and down by his chest, as though milking a cow. Finally, he laid the fingers of one hand flat on his chin and flexed his wrist forward.

Hartwell, who has no hearing problems, had just used BSL, British Sign Language, to order his morning latte with normal milk at the deaf-run Dialogue Cafe, based at the University of East London, and thanked Victor Olaniyan, the deaf barista.

Published: February 1, 2026, 2:18 pm

‘Menopause gold rush’? Boom in hi-tech products as stigma starts to recede

The march of wearable tech is coming to the aid of women in what some say is a long underserved market

For any bodily function you want to measure these days there is a gadget – a wristband for step-counting, a watch to track your heart rate or a ring for measuring sleep.

Now the march of wearable tech is coming to the aid of what some say is a long underserved market: menopausal women.

Published: February 1, 2026, 10:00 am

‘Adjustments must be made’: how to live well after mid-life

We are living longer and longer, but many of us are unprepared for the challenges age brings, says the novelist and psychotherapist Frank Tallis

We have never lived so long, so well, nor had more available advice on how to do so: don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t eat ultraprocessed foods; lift weights, get outside, learn a language. Cosmetics – or surgery – have never been so available, so advanced, nor so widely used; we take for granted medical procedures that previous ages would have considered miracles. And something’s clearly working: average global life expectancy is the highest in recorded history. The fastest growing demographic is now the over-80s.

There is much public hand-wringing about the burdens this ageing population will place on health and care systems, and on younger people. But what is far less talked about, argues the clinical psychologist Frank Tallis in his new book, Wise, is how to get older well: not just in physical, but in mental good health.

Published: February 1, 2026, 4:00 pm

Ex-British army chief calls on ministers to back MDMA-assisted therapy for veterans

Nick Carter says easing controls on MDMA will allow drug to be used as alternative treatment for those with PTSD

A former head of the British military is calling for the government to ease restrictions on the party drug MDMA so that it can be tested more cheaply as a treatment for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Sir Nick Carter, who was chief of the defence staff until 2021, said existing regulations meant a single gram of “medical grade” MDMA cost about £10,000 compared with a street price of about £40, inflating the cost of trials.

Published: February 1, 2026, 7:00 am

Catch a falling star: cosmic dust may reveal how life began, and a Sydney lab is making it from scratch

Recreating cosmic dust may help answer questions about how meteorites hitting Earth came to contain organic matter

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How does one acquire star dust? One option, as the Perry Como song suggests, is to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, so to speak.

Thousands of tonnes of cosmic dust bombard the Earth each year, mostly vaporising in the atmosphere. The asteroid and comet fragments that do not burn up – known as meteorites and micrometeorites if they hit Earth – provide scientists with valuable clues about the cosmos.

Published: February 1, 2026, 2:00 pm