TikTok To Be Sold To Trump’s Right Wing Billionaire Buddies And Converted Into A Propaganda Mill

Failures

from the Ministry-of-Information dept

Donald Trump has successfully used xenophobia and fake concerns about propaganda and national security to get what he’s long wanted: TikTok (and its fat ad revenues) are poised to be sold off to his right wing billionaire buddies and, inevitably, slowly converted into a right wing propaganda safe space.

After endless delays, Trump insiders claim to be zeroing in on a deal that would sell 80% of TikTok’s U.S. assets to Andreessen Horowitz (owned by Marc Andreessen, an increasingly incoherent right wing billionaire and close Trump ally), Oracle (owned by Larry Ellison, a rabidly right wing billionaire and close Trump ally), and Silver Lake (a hedge fund with a history of… predatory and dodgy behaviors).

Andreessen and Ellison are, to be clear, technofascists who don’t believe in democracy, regulatory oversight, or basic privacy protections for consumers. The remaining 20 percent would remain in the hands of Chinese ownership and the Chinese government, which still has to finalize the deal. This is not, contrary to what you’ll read in the pages of WAPO or CNN, a net improvement.

Oh, and Donald Trump will get to appoint a board member. Remember when Republicans were against government interference in private businesses?

If you recall, selling TikTok to Trump’s buddies was always his goal (remember he originally wanted it split between Walmart and Oracle). It just got temporarily disrupted by his 2020 election loss.

Trump still didn’t truly get what he really wanted: reporting in the Financial Times suggests that China will still technically own and control the algorithm used to power TikTok, something Trump had previously said was essential to any deal. Early reporting by the Wall Street Journal also indicates that existing TikTok users will have to migrate to a new app.

“Come join an app majority owned by Donald Trump’s unhinged right wing billionaire friends where there’s no competent hate speech and right wing propaganda safeguards” is going to be a tricky selling point that could ultimately throw sand in the gears, and create the potential for another (hopefully better?) company to disrupt their plans.

Now is the time for Silicon Valley to engage in that boundless innovation we’ve all heard so much about.

It Was Never About Privacy And National Security

I’ve noted more times than I can count that the push to ban TikTok was never really about protecting American privacy. If that were true, we would pass a real privacy law and craft serious penalties for companies and executives that play fast and loose with sensitive American data, be it TikTok or the myriad of super dodgy apps, telecoms, and hardware vendors monetizing your phone usage.

It was never really about propaganda. If that were true, we’d take aim at the extremely well funded authoritarian propaganda machine and engage in content moderation of race-baiting political propaganda that’s filling the brains of young American men with pudding and hate. We’d push for education media literacy reforms common in countries like Finland.

Banning TikTok was never really about national security. If that were true, we wouldn’t be dismantling our cybersecurity regulators, accidentally hosting sensitive military chats over Signal with journalists, voting to cement utterly incompetent knobs in unaccountable roles across military intelligence, and letting dodgy data brokers sell sensitive personal info to global governments (including our own).

TikTok’s Chinese ownership did pose some very real legitimate security, privacy, and NatSec concerns, but the MAGA folks “fixing” the problem were never competent or good faith actors, and the push to ban hijack TikTok was always about ego, money, and information control.

Ego; Trump got mad at TikTok videos making fun of his small crowd sizes. Money; Facebook worked tirelessly to spread bogus moral panics about TikTok in order to kill off a competitor they couldn’t out-innovate. Control; the GOP wants to own TikTok so they can ensure it’s friendly to an essential cornerstone of party power — their propaganda.

From day one, our shitty technology press helped prop up the myth that this was a good faith effort to manage national security and privacy issues. And the Democrats engaged in one of the most idiotic own goals in tech policy history by helping a billionaire authoritarian shift ownership of the country’s most popular short-form video app to his technofascist buddies.

We’re going to be paying the price for a very long time.

Larry Ellison in particular has been very keen to leverage his massive wealth gains during the Trump era(s) to buy every new and old media venture his family can get its hands on, from CBS and CNN (Time Warner), to TikTok. Trump’s FCC is busy stripping away whatever is left of media consolidation limits to accommodate this massive right wing power grab. And TikTok’s a very central piece of the puzzle.

American authoritarians are following the same playbook we’ve seen in countries like Hungary, where new and old media and journalism is either destroyed or hijacked in service to authoritarian leadership. It’s happening here, now, and the very least ethical people can do is recognize it and put up a fight.

Filed Under: authoritarians, disinformation, donald trump, information warfare, larry ellison, marc andreessen, propaganda, social media, tiktok ban
Companies: andreessen horowitz, bytedance, silverlake partners, tiktok