Trump's Not So Puzzling FlipFlop About TikTok

 

In his first term, Donald Jethro Trump made no bones about wanting TikTok banned in the U.S. as a threat to national security. On January 6, 2020, in an ExecOrder he invoked his emergency economic powers to impose broad sanctions against TikTok, "a move that steps up pressure on the Chinese-owned app to sell its U.S. assets to an American company."

He has now, of course, and illegally it appears -- a president can't just rewrite Congressional legislation on a whim -- become TikTok's savior. Trump instructed prosecutors not to enforce the ban. What turned him around?

Two things. March 2024. Jeff Yass, a billionaire investor and Republican megadonor who owns a significant share of TikTok's parent company ByteDance, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago. This visit appears to coincide with Trump's change of attitude toward TikTok. Did you not notice the adjective megadonor appended to Yass's name? Jethro is not nothing if he isn't a total whore for money.

Second thing: Summer 2024. A dude who actually works for Jeff Yass at his trading firm Susquehanna International Group and is a Trump insider -- Tony Sayegh -- talks Trump into joining TikTok for the sake of his campaign, and now Trump has 14 million followers and has publicly acknowledged TikTok's part in his winning reelection. ("TikTok Butters Up Trump," Jan. 19)

Back to the Original Q: What's Dangerous About TikTok?

In its unanimous decision upholding the banning of TikTok unless it's sold to new, non-Chinese owners, the Supreme Court just three days before Trump's inauguration cited reports that the data TikTok collects from users includes ages, phone numbers, contacts, internet addresses, exact locations, and contents of private messages sent through the app.

TikTok didn’t dispute the data collection in the Supreme Court case. Hilariously, it claimed it was “unlikely” that the Chinese government would force the company to hand over information, to which you could hear even Clarence Thomas stifling a guffaw. Chinese companies are required by law to cooperate with State Security.

I think -- and you might think too -- as a casual user of TikTok, you're not personally threatened by any surveillance the Chinese secret police puts on you. So what? How is my piddling life, with its boring routines, of any use to the Chinese? But just consider, brother, the possibilities that other civilians -- a lot of them, actually -- could present to a foreign adversary determined to cause us trouble:

"If I were China’s minister of state security, I would be asking about any TikTok accounts of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s four children. I’d also inquire about accounts of children of people across the government and military, looking to turn phones and laptops into microphones and cameras, as well as track locations, find blackmail material and locate still more targets." (Nicholas Kristof)

Hadn't thought of that, had we?

According to Kristof, "about 40 percent of young adults in the United States regularly get news from TikTok, and researchers find evidence that TikTok’s algorithm systematically manipulates information to present users with a pro-China view of the world."

Trump's need for an adoring audience and his ambition to make us all bend the knee will make good opportunistic use of TikTok.