maga's final solution to the tiktok problem
Handing TikTok to Trump's friends seems like a slam dunk for MAGA's PR goals, but the platform may be too unruly and too feisty to easily manipulate.
TikTok is one of the most important platforms across the world today, like it or not. Its user base is estimated at roughly 2 billion. That’s a third of all internet users, and just short of a quarter of all humans, who use it for an average of an hour every day. It’s on par with YouTube in reach and popularity, but what sets its apart is its focus on trends and insanely quick spread of real time news and activism.
It was even too big to ban, forcing the Trump administration to backtrack on its quest to get the platform off American phones and sell 80% of it to a group which includes MAGA billionaires Michael Dell, Jeff Yass, Steve Case, Larry Ellison, a large, powerful AI fund from the UAE, and a smattering of tech VCs. ByteDance still owns about 20% of the remaining entity, but is now relegated to being a minority player.
Now, the official switchover has not exactly been smooth. First, it came with pretty off-putting and aggressive new terms of service. Secondly, it saw a nasty outage in one of Oracle’s data centers, which have been serving TikTok for years. And finally, reports of behavior that sounds an awful lot like Fox News-style censorship.
While sudden zero view counts on videos from creators with close to, or over 100,000 followers and used to exploding stats on upload can be explained by an outage which isn’t updating the counter — on a platform as large as TikTok, you’d need caching and message queues to keep accurate track of views and engagement, so outages would seriously hinder that — overzealous and preemptive community violations, and errors on upload for any mentions of the Epstein Files and ICE protests in Minnesota don’t come off looking well.
If you desperately wanted to, you could tally up every video and prove that no, it’s just a very self-selecting loud sample of users complaining that they were being censored and here are all these other people who also had problems. Except this would be very stupid because it’s already too late for that exercise.
why no one actually trusts tiktok
TikTok, much like YouTube or any other major social platform, operate as a network of black boxes. Our content goes in, others’ content is barfed out by rules we are never going to be privy to. If TikTok was a Southern BBQ joint, the algorithm which decides what comes next on the For You Page is their secret rub. If you were able to calculate how to get on the most timelines, you could become a millionaire in a week, and there is absolutely no way they could ever grant a user that kind of power.
The tradeoff? Zero trust in the platform and those who own it. Yes, according to the official Republican Boomer narrative, everyone under 30 is enthralled by a stream of anti-American Chinese agitprop, but that’s not necessarily true. It’s another massive generational disconnect at work.
A lot of Americans just liked having an environment where they could fine-tune their algorithm so they were no longer pelted by rage baiting posts from a bot farm called something like PatriotMAGAMama1776, unlike on other huge U.S. platforms. And yes, there was very little criticism of China on the platform, but younger Americans tend to be pretty dissatisfied with their country in the first place and vented their frustrations once in a while.
But the general attitude is that TikTok is like a casino, it’s nothing more than an app to effectively show ads with content breaks in between, and you can’t believe everything you see on it because it’s just a way to sell you something through influencers plainly hawking merch through the TikTok Shop and sponsored posts, and ads from massive corporations doing their best “how do you do fellow kids?” impressions.
Furthermore, creators on the app all have stories of videos being banned or struck in moments, with no explanation. My video on anti-vax policies in Florida got suspended just as it picked up steam, only to be reinstated on appeal minutes later. Meanwhile, if I post anything on the mansophere, even a joke, I get an instant community strike and am told to delete it. No appeal, no explanation, just an instant no, while similar content is posted seemingly without issue by others. Not exactly behavior that breeds trust or forgiveness for glitches and errors.
why the damage may already be done
At some point, it really doesn’t matter if MAGA billionaires who now collectively own half of TikTok U.S. decide to censor the platform’s trends, or if they just suffered an unfortunately timed, embarrassing glitch.
The entire enterprise is already tainted, there is no trust to allow for an explanation that doesn’t involve some nefarious undertone, and creators are on the lookout for any sign of malfeasance, staying only so they could use the platform for as long as possible to grow their brands because they know that 98% of the current user base won’t leave until necessary, and doesn’t much care about anything political.
It helps to think of the current situation as less of an American corporate acquisition, and more of a Mexican standoff. The Trump administration wants leverage to make a bunch of billionaire financiers use TikTok for its propaganda. The investors might not be so eager to do that because they want to make their money back and need users to stay, while also not catching Trump’s ire. The creators despise both, but need the users to like and follow.
As for the users? Well, they’re fickle and nihilistic. Apps come and go, and as long as their favorite creators are elsewhere to be found, they’ll go there. Which will probably mean YouTube, hardly an upstart filled with unknowns and still in beta, and where so many of their favorites might gave even gotten started in the first place.
Deep down, everyone knows that whoever owns TikTok owns the Gen Z zeitgeist, but we also know that they’re easy to spook, trust no one, and have little loyalty to brands or politicians. One wrong move and the platform could go the way of MySpace in the U.S., so only subtle propaganda techniques could plausibly work. But with everyone on the app on high alert, even subtle may prove very difficult to pull off…