BRISBANE: When English statesman Sir Francis Bacon famously said “knowledge is power”, he could hardly have foreseen the rise of ubiquitous social media some 500 years later. Yet social media platforms are some of the world’s most powerful businesses – not least because they can collect massive amounts of user data, and use algorithms to turn the data into actionable knowledge. Today, TikTok has some of the best algorithms in the business and a suite of data-collection mechanisms . This is how it manages to be so addictive, with some 1.2 billion users as of December 2021. This number is...