TikTok: A little help from Trump’s friends

Keeping Beijing’s hands off the sensitive data of some 170 million American users now “appears to be less important to Trump” than feeding his new spoils system.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

“Crony capitalism has reached a new low,” said David French in The New York Times. After months of defying Congress’s 2024 TikTok ban, President Trump last week unveiled a deal with the video app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, that fails to resolve national security concerns and places yet another media outlet in the hands of “his billionaire allies.” The U.S. investor group that will own about 80% of TikTok includes Oracle and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, led by prominent Trump supporters Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen, respectively. Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, Trump claimed, would also have a stake. That consortium will license the recommendation algorithm that ByteDance uses to keep TikTok users scrolling—flatly ignoring a law that prohibits any cooperation with ByteDance on running TikTok’s algorithm. Keeping Beijing’s hands off the sensitive data of some 170 million American users now “appears to be less important to Trump” than feeding his new spoils system.

Ellison, who has been “assiduously friendly to Trump,” is on a roll, said Clare Malone in The New Yorker. The TikTok deal adds to the “emerging media conglomerate” assembled by the 81-year-old tech mogul and his son David, who has acquired Paramount—owner of CBS—and is reportedly putting together an $80 billion bid for CNN owner Warner Bros. Discovery. That means the Ellisons could within weeks “own a movie studio, multiple television streamers, two news networks, and have a significant stake in the world’s fastest-growing social media platform.” This is how regimes in other backsliding democracies have quashed press freedom, said Paul Starr in The American Prospect: not by direct state takeover but by letting regime-friendly oligarchs “run media on the regime’s behalf.” Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and “Rupert Murdoch’s existing influence operation” have already created a more Trump-friendly infosphere. Now the Ellisons are pitching in.

This deal still leaves TikTok’s algorithm as a “black box” in China’s hands, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. But the deal will split off America from the rest of the world. “How will videos on TikTok America appear to the outside world and vice versa?”And what happens to TikTok’s worldwide “viral stars”? However those matters are handled, many people will suspect that on the new TikTok, Trump is “pulling the strings,” just as China does on its home turf with apps like Douyin, the censored Chinese version of TikTok. This deal could prove to be “the first big red brick to be placed in the Border Firewall of America.”