We’ve noted more time than I can count how the U.S. ban of TikTok (yes, yes I know, it’s not a ban, it’s a forced divestment ByteDance was never going to agree with) was pointless fucking performance art.
Not only was it unconstitutional, it did nothing to actually address the privacy and national security issues it professed to fix. We’re a country too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law. We’re too corrupt to even regulate data brokers that routinely hoover up oceans of sensitive consumer data and then sell it to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together (including domestic extremists and foreign intelligence).
Hyperventilating about a single Chinese-app in an ocean of dodgy and unregulated consumer surveillance was always more about greed and protecting Facebook and U.S. tech companies from competition than it ever was about seriously addressing U.S. privacy, NatSec, or propaganda concerns.
With that as backdrop, Trump is telling his allies (for whatever that’s ultimately worth) that he wants to reverse the U.S. ban on TikTok. The law, passed last April, gave ByteDance until January 19 to find a U.S. buyer or face getting kicked out of the country.
“The president-elect has not yet announced a decision on if, or how to proceed, but some advisers expect him to intervene on TikTok’s behalf if necessary — including Conway and three others, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump promised during the campaign to protect the app even though he also signed an executive order in his first term that would have effectively banned it: “I’m gonna save TikTok,” he said in one of his first videos on the app this June.”
Trump of course isn’t operating with any sort of genuine, good faith policy or intellectual curiosity here. He correctly believes TikTok can be useful for Republicans’ massive online propaganda efforts, and, like most feckless U.S. tech companies, ultimately bullied away from competently moderating right wing propaganda and race-baiting bile on the internet if it wants to keep doing business here.
It’s also just about money. In 2020, Trump wanted to ban TikTok when he thought there was a chance he could offload it to his buddies Larry Ellison and Safra Catz at Oracle. In 2024, Trump’s motivation is in cozying up to Jeffrey Yass, a major billionaire Trump donor creator of the conservative Club for Growth, who holds a 15% stake in TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance.
A Trump reversal of a TikTok ban (which the Post explains won’t be easy) will result in all sorts of entertaining chaos among his bobble-headed brigadiers. Kellyanne Conway now works for Yass and Club For Growth defending TikTok in the press. In contrast, Trump’s likely FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent the last four years crying about TikTok to please Trump and get his face on cable TV.
As Conway’s quote to the Post makes clear, Yass and Trump want to frame this self-serving reversal as something profoundly more noble than it actually is, leveraging the fact that this ban was always a giant political turd for Democrats:
“He appreciates the breadth and reach of TikTok, which he used masterfully along with podcasts and new media entrants to win,” said Kellyanne Conway, who ran Trump’s first presidential campaign, served in the White House and remains close to him and now also advocates for TikTok. “There are many ways to hold China to account outside alienating 180 million U.S. users each month. Trump recognized early on that Democrats are the party of bans — gas-powered cars, menthol cigarettes, vapes, plastic straws and TikTok — and to let them own that draconian, anti-personal-choice space.”
Then of course you’ve got Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, who, ahead of the ban, were caught seeding no limit of bogus moral panics in DC and among press outlets for anticompetitive reasons (which oddly gets omitted from most press coverage of this story).
Anybody who thinks any of these folks care about protecting consumer privacy or national security is deluding themselves. The U.S. refusal to regulate data brokers or pass a privacy law makes it repeatedly, painfully clear that this country has prioritized making money over consumer privacy and public safety. Any pretense we care about fighting propaganda is even more laughable in the wake of this election.
Another major reason the U.S. government doesn’t want to seriously tackle consumer privacy is because the dysfunctional and unaccountable data broker space allows them to spy on Americans without getting a pesky warrant. Banning Tiktok is a performance that distracted the public from our broader widespread failures on propaganda, surveillance, consumer protection, privacy, and national security.
There certainly are privacy, propaganda, and national security concerns related to TikTok. They’ll never be confused for an ethical company. But that’s never really been what any of this was about for this pit of self-serving vipers, who were primarily interested in using those issues (and xenophobia) as cover to prop up their varied and often conflicting financial ambitions.
