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President Donald Trump’s friends are trying to take control of TikTok’s algorithm—and with his help, they’re close to doing it. On Sept. 25, Trump announced a “deal” between TikTok parent ByteDance and a group of American investors, which Trump has indicated include conservative media titans Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison. The deal does not seem done, even though the administration is acting like it is.
Until the details get filled in, Democrats with any interest in having political power might consider doing two things. One is making a loud fuss about the transaction. The other is paying close attention to who put them in this predicament—specifically, Joe Biden and Democratic congressional leadership.
If the deal closes, it will be a long-term disaster for any left-of-center political project. Imagine Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, but on very powerful steroids. Twitter gave him agenda-setting power on an app that most elite political journalists will never quit. It also made him a kingpin and punched his ticket to serve as co-leader of the free world for several months. Whether X was a tool of mass political persuasion in the 2024 election is less clear, though. The platform is a black box now that Musk has taken it private, and it’s overrun with spam and A.I. accounts. It’s also orders of magnitude smaller than TikTok.
A conservative takeover of TikTok will be a much bigger problem for American liberalism, and anything left of it, than X could ever be. The platform’s rapidly growing and news-hungry user base is somewhere well into the billions, compared with Twitter’s pre-Musk usage of around 230 million daily users. Of all the major social media apps, TikTok is the one whose success is most rooted in serving content to people via an algorithm, rather than having users pick what they look at. The app’s success influenced almost every other social media platform to take a similar approach. TikTok has limitless influence potential, which is why Trump is so keen for his pals to control it in the United States.
Amazingly, it was Biden who set up these pins and left the bowling alley for Trump to knock them down. This feels like an inopportune time to point out an ex-president’s tactical failure around a social media app, as Trump throws the military at his own people and turns the American regulatory state into a shakedown operation. But that’s just the thing: For Democrats, this is an exceptionally bad time to give Trump de facto control of one of the most popular information platforms in world history. And giving it to him is exactly what Biden did.
TikTok took off in the United States during Trump’s first term, thanks to Lil Nas X and a bunch of teenagers. Its Chinese ownership by Beijing-based ByteDance quickly drew the attention of China hawks, who thought that the Chinese Communist Party was using it for either illicit surveillance of Americans, party propaganda, or both. There is a good bit of evidence on the feed manipulation point, including that TikTok has intentionally made it harder for researchers to get a macro read on the platform. There is less on the surveillance point. TikTok has violated U.S. child privacy laws in the past, but that’s just in keeping with the proud tradition of countless American tech firms. It’s genuinely hard to tell how much of TikTok’s bad behavior around user data comes down to a foreign influence operation versus typical tech company greed and recklessness.
It was Trump, not Biden, who first gave real juice to the idea of the United States banning TikTok. In 2020, Trump threatened a ban as retaliation for China’s handling of the coronavirus. A few years and most of a presidential term later, both the House and Senate finally passed the ban, as part of a bigger foreign aid bill. Democrats helped out in both chambers, with 165 of them voting to advance it in the House and 46 (all but two) in the Senate. Biden signed it in April 2024, weeks before he walked on to a debate stage in Atlanta and took a lectern across from Trump. Why did Biden sign this bill? Or, for that matter, not intervene with his own party’s congressional leaders before it ever got to him? House Speaker Mike Johnson undoubtedly wanted to make it hard to avoid a TikTok ban when he roped it into the same bill as aid money to Israel and Ukraine. Could it have really been that easy? Apparently, yes.
The ban, absent ByteDance selling off TikTok, was to go into effect on Jan. 20, 2025, immediately before someone would be inaugurated for a fresh term. What happened next feels like a perfect storm but was not that hard to foresee. Biden withered before our eyes. Kamala Harris replaced him and lost. Trump, who campaigned with obvious blood thirst, returned to power almost exactly concurrently with the ban’s effective date. Shortly before the inauguration, TikTok went offline for American users, but left a note: that Trump had said he would “work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!” The platform returned right after the inauguration, as Trump immediately made clear that the American government wouldn’t enforce the ban. The conservative justices of the Supreme Court (who had just upheld the law, along with the liberals) did not mind. Republicans in Congress didn’t mind either. Come to think of that, neither did Chuck Schumer. Trump has pushed back TikTok’s sell-by date four times so far as he’s angled for a deal that works for him.
In fairness, I had also been under the impression that laws were laws. But one of Biden’s many hubrises in 2024 was not seeing where this was all going, from his doomed campaign to the inauguration of an opponent who was always poised to take a mafioso approach to regulating mergers and acquisitions. Trump—the first president to publicly back a TikTok ban!—got to be its savior. “SAVING TIKTOK WHILE PROTECTING NATIONAL SECURITY” is the real title of a real executive order. All Trump had to do for it was not enforce a law that he had previously advocated for, and use the pressure of the state to get a favorable deal on whatever timeline he, personally, liked. What a sensational gift to get from his predecessor/successor.
As Biden exits public life, he has left the entire political left with a heap of trash to sift through. The previous status quo was that TikTok was controlled by a sleazy tech company that was a lot like our own homegrown sleazy tech companies, with some additional foreign policy concerns. The new status quo, if this deal closes, will be TikTok’s algorithm falling under the control of close allies of Trump’s who will unquestionably use it to promote right-wing speech at the expense of anything else. It is clear which of these situations is worse for American liberalism. Who did Biden think was going to buy TikTok, when he signed the deal compelling its divestiture? Which party’s billionaires had previously shown a bigger appetite for buying influential media platforms? What was the plan? Was Reid Hoffman going to buy it? Did Biden realize how ridiculous that sounds but decide to sign the bill anyway out of dutiful China hawkism? He had been moving in that direction even before he took office. Was there no other way to address national security questions than to try to force a sale, putting an amazing propaganda machine on the market for the right bidder?
Because this deal isn’t actually a deal yet—China hasn’t confirmed it, nor has ByteDance—there’s still a small window of time for Democrats to raise hell about it. That would be hard, however, given that the vast majority of the Democrats in Congress voted to let this happen. In that event, all Democrats can do is learn the right lessons—specifically, that you really can use the power of the state to compel the behavior you want from social media companies, and you don’t even have to be bashful about it. Republicans will (and do) accuse Democrats of colluding with social media companies to destructive ends. Why get the sizzle of the accusation without the steak of wielding government authority to put these companies under the control of people on your team?
Trump’s allies are angling to maximize their control of legacy media outlets, and they’re doing well. The conglomerates that Trump’s friends have not already bought are under intense, nakedly partisan pressure from federal regulators. Most of the tech giants are either controlled by Trump’s ideological teammates (X), managed by executives who will do what Trump wants without too much pressure (Google, Meta, Microsoft), or run by people currently making their newspapers more right-wing in hopes of getting favorable treatment from the big man (Amazon). Conservatives are already doing a whale of a job taking over the American information environment. Democrats might consider reflecting on if they should have helped them take the biggest prize yet.
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