Microsoft has emerged in recent days as the leading suitor for the fast-growing but embattled social media app TikTok. What the company may be buying is a big headache.

The tech giant said it would continue negotiating toward a purchase of the short-video-sharing service amid President Trump’s attempts to ban from the United States or wrest control of TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company. The president’s concerns ostensibly revolve around security, particularly the threat — real or imagined — that the Chinese government may gain access to TikTok’s valuable data on American citizens.

But what would staid old Microsoft, purveyor of Windows and Excel, get out of this deal? Instant access to a demographic that has largely bypassed it.

The company would, though, also be taking on all of the hassles and dangers that come with running a social media service: hate speech, misinformation, trolling, nudity, copyright infringement. Interspersed with TikTok’s largely anodyne content are growing far-right communities, white supremacists and Covid-19 misinformation.

“Microsoft is buying itself real aggravation,” said Gigi Sohn, a former Federal Communications Commission senior adviser and a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy. “There’s no reason hate speech and misinformation won’t just keep growing.”

More at New York Times.