Over the weekend, TikTok very briefly died in the United States before being reborn some 12 hours later, bearing a jaunty new banner.
“As a result of President Trump’s efforts,” it read, in part, “TikTok is back in the U.S.”
The biggest tech and social media companies have consolidated behind Trump.
Trump was not yet president on Sunday, when TikTok began restoring U.S. access despite a Supreme Court ruling Friday upholding a law meant to ban it. But the deeper message was unmistakable: the Chinese-owned company ByteDance and its CEO Shou Zi Chew would do anything to placate Trump and keep its most profitable app online for American users. Trump also said on Sunday that he’d issue an executive order delaying the implementation of TikTok’s ban in the U.S.
As many pointed out, it was a long way from 2020, when Trump vowed to ban the app “immediately” as a threat to national security. On TruthSocial, Trump even suggested a deal to keep TikTok online that would involve the U.S. gaining “a 50% joint ownership” position. TikTok hasn’t yet responded to idea, but the Chinese government has signaled it wouldn’t object.
A day after the app’s American resurrection, Chew came to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, along with two other social media giants, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Also present was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook. Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world and a booster of both Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was also in the room.
All of this, of course, points to one simple fact: the total consolidation of the biggest tech and social media companies behind the new president. “What this effectively means is that every social media platform, mass social media platform in the United States, has been taken over by the right wing,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said in a Sunday video posted—ironically, but unavoidably—to Meta-owned Instagram.
The conciliatory approach social media companies have taken to Trump caps a long process of retreat from the social media companies playing an active role in policing deceptive speech and false information, including Twitter’s rollback of enforcing rules around disinformation and continuing with Meta’s recent decision to replace fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes. Trump and conservative leaders have long claimed that such initiatives censored right-wing views.
Besides its laudatory banner, on Sunday night TikTok also hosted the Power 30 Awards inauguration party, which paid tribute to conservative influencers who use the platform as the company handed out TikTok-branded swag and chocolates. Spotify and Google also hosted parties over the weekend celebrating Trump’s return to power.
