Trump's Crock on TikTok Previews 4 More Years of Schlock

Anyone expecting MAGA to improve things on the Big Tech front hasn't been paying attention.

Bit by bit, it’s getting harder to ignore the reality that the Donald Trump we may very well get as president next year is not the devil-may-care right-wing warrior the grifters are selling to their audiences (and not just because he’s now openly saying he’s not a conservative).

As the Washington Examiner’s Zachary Faria helpfully summarized Monday, Trump is now against banning Chicom data harvesting scam TikTok—and you’ll never guess why (that is, unless you haven’t been living under a rock for the better part of the last decade):

He had previously (correctly) pushed to ban the app for being Chinese spyware, which it clearly is. He pursued an executive order that would ban TikTok unless the Chinese company that owns it, ByteDance, sells the app to a company that does not have ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Now that Congress is again considering a bill that would do exactly that, Trump has changed his tune. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, to do better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”

Is the sudden change of heart truly the result of a moronic calculation that Facebook will “double” its business and that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is worse than the CCP? Perhaps. But, coincidentally, Trump’s flip-flop also comes just one week after GOP billionaire donor Jeff Yass visited Mar-a-Lago. Yass is reportedly threatening GOP legislators with pulling his funding from them if they push forward with their bill, which Yass denies, for what that is worth.

Why is this? Yass personally owns a 7% stake in ByteDance worth around $21 billion. His investment firm bought a 15% stake in ByteDance in 2012.

There’s a lot to unpack here, from yet another issue where Trump is putting corporate/donor interests first and conservative principles last, to the fact that he apparently thinks nothing of punching a hole in his own China hawk image (which currently includes promises to “kick Chinese intelligence operations out of the country” and “pressure the Chinese to sell off any current holdings that threaten the country’s national and economic security”). But arguably the biggest absurdity is the excuse that letting TikTok off easy is necessary for standing up to Facebook.

Putting aside the dubious idea that Facebook scooping up a portion of TikTok’s video uploads would amount to “doubling” its overall business (which only comes to even that if TikTok is banned entirely, rather than simply forced to be divested from its CCP-linked owners), or the problem with likening the (admittedly-real) danger of a censorious social network to that of a hostile Communist dictatorship, the simple fact is that addressing one in no way prevents addressing the other.

As we discussed on December 1, there are numerous proposals on the table for cracking down on political censorship and viewpoint discrimination by Big Tech. There are debates to be had about what would work best, how not to violate platforms’ own speech and property rights in the process, etc., but the key point for our purposes is that acting against the completely different problem TikTok poses would not interfere with them in any way.

More critically, anyone who thinks Donald Trump would crack down on “true Enemy of the People” Facebook with or without TikTok hasn’t been paying attention. Like countless issues, Trump did little more than complain about Big Tech censorship during his time in the White House. In May 2020 he did issue an executive order on the subject, but it did little more than call for existing rules to be reviewed and “clarified.” In fairness, there’s probably not much more that could have lawfully been done through executive action alone, but that brings us back to Donald’s utter disinterest and ineptitude for the legislative process.

Of course, it doesn’t help that flattery is to Trump as kryptonite is to Superman. Over the years, the 45^th president has rambled about how Zuckerberg supposedly “kissed my ass” during White House dinners, which apparently made it not such a big deal that Facebook was censoring mere mortal righties all throughout his presidency. But after the platform banned him?

Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. It will be all business!

We know what “business” means in Trumpworld. Unfortunately for anyone hoping for actual progress for free speech on the internet, so does Mark Zuckerberg.