Dem
47
GOP
53
There are certainly some things where Donald Trump has excellent instincts. He knows that the greater control he can exert over the Fourth Estate, the easier his life is. And despite the fact that his worldview is mostly stuck in the 1970s and 1980s, he's also managed to figure out that the traditional Fourth Estate is increasingly less relevant, and is being supplanted by social media.
These things being the case, nobody can be surprised by the details of the TikTok divestment, which have begun to come out. Trump made a mockery of the law passed by Congress, extending the negotiation window several times, despite having no authority to do so. Now, it is clear why; he was setting it up so his ultra-MAGA techie friends and allies would be able to assume primary ownership of the American portion of the service, and its more-precious-than-gold-pressed-latinum algorithm.
The new ownership of 80% of the site, reportedly, is a consortium that includes Trumpy tech magnates Larry and David Ellison and Marc Andreesen, as well as media moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Trump also managed to wangle a multi-billion-dollar fee for the U.S. Government, which will undoubtedly end up going to something like the Trump ballroom fund, or the Qatar Force One maintenance fund.
The thinking here could not be more plain. TikTok has 170 million users in the U.S. and, in particular, has wide currency among younger users. Trump and his MAGA minions plan to use that access to propagandize their political views, and to try to use resentment and rage to get as many young people voting Republican/MAGA as is possible.
Could it work? Maybe. While the Chinese have been running it, TikTok has been a very effective vehicle for that government's... messaging. The most famous/infamous recent example involves Israel. Whether there has been genocide there or not (and we have a piece planned on that subject for tomorrow), the deployment of the word "genocide" by mostly younger Americans began very nearly at the same time as the conflict between Israel and Hamas did, before "genocide" could possibly be accurate. There is abundant evidence that came from those individuals' TikTok feeds. And the Chinese government, which is able to control what is shown on TikTok, had enormous interest in sowing dissension in the U.S., and among the nations of the West.
So, Trump & Co. are clearly hoping to replicate the "success," such as it is, of the Chinese government. There are, however, a couple of flies in the ointment. The first is that the Chinese are master propagandists, who seized upon a nearly ideal situation for getting people's blood boiling. It's not clear that the Ellisons, Andreesen, the Murdochs, etc. have that particular skill (especially since Ellison is the one who will reportedly be running the show). Beyond that, young people tend to use a particular platform right up until the time they... move on to a different platform. Head over to the ghost town that is MySpace these days for an illustration of this dynamic. Or even Facebook, where the average user's age must have increased by 20 years in the last 5 years. (Z)