The meteoric rise of TikTok, the video-sharing app owned by Chinese technology giant ByteDance, is already being hailed as a potent platform for political expression, but this is complicated by its economic and geopolitical entanglements, namely the ongoing power rivalry between China and the US, as well as TikTok’s adherence to a business bottom line. This short commentary aims to unpack some of the structural issues which contextualise TikTok’s particular brand of political ambivalence ahead of designations of the platform as a meaningful site for political participation.