The TikTok disaster and Democratic elite blindness
By 
Does handing the world’s biggest and most powerful social media platform to Trumpist propaganda mongers sound like a good idea?
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.
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?
The underlying structural problems here include the existence of people like Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos, i.e., centibillionaires, the astonishing blindness of Democratic party elites, most especially Biden himself, to the fact that Donald Trump had completely taken over the Republican party by 2020, and that winning one presidential election wasn’t going to change that, and the closely related liberal-left failure to fight fire with fire — the whole when they go low we go high pathology.
In 2025, the political movement that can control social media will control the political universe, more or less. Fighting algorithm-driven propaganda dissemination with lame-ass marketplace of ideas pieties, aka Ezra Klein disease, is storming a machine gun nest with a pocket knife.