TikTok- "Digital Fentanyl?"...or a buncha oldsters fearing what they don't understand, #2

Is not understanding something reason enough to ban it? Asking for several million youngsters...oh, and Donald Trump's corruption figures in, as well

Yeah, I’ll bet she doesn’t use TikTok, either….

Yesterday, I discussed how Congress, a collection of old people who collectively don’t understand social media, wants to ban TikTok. Something about the Chinese Communist government, yadayadayada….

The Chinese are easy to demonize, perhaps because no one knows what they’re up to. And, since TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has ties of some sort to the Chinese Communist government, they must ipso facto be evil and working to subvert America to their nefarious agenda, whatever the Hell it is.

No one knows what “it” is, but it’s gotta be bad, right? They’re Chinese. How could it be good?? They hate us for our freedoms. And our steaks. Or something like that.

Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to do the same thing in 2020 when he was President. Four years later, the presumptive GOP Presidential candidate is singing a different tune. Could it have something to do with money for a man who’s under significant financial pressure these days? Inquiring minds, like

Matthew Yglesias

, would like to know:

Back on February 6, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that, in his opinion, Bud Light had learned its lesson from the backlash to their Dylan Mulvaney marketing deal and so it was okay for conservatives to drink their beer again. Why the flip-flop? Well, it turned out that “a top Republican lobbyist for the company is set to host a fundraiser for the former president next month, with some tickets going at $10,000 each.”

That episode was a reminder of many things. One, is that while Trump is often portrayed in the press as some kind of atavistic force of nature, he is in fact perfectly capable of exercising restraint and strategic discipline when he wants to. The other is that unlike a conventional politician, he almost never exercises restraint and strategic discipline to advance a substantive public policy goal. Instead, he operates on a basis of self-interest. And at times, as during the Bud Light fight, the kind of tawdry corruption that results from this can seem appealingly moderate and practical compared to the ideological fanaticism and self-righteousness that so often dominates American politics.

Surprise, Anheuser-Busch repurchased their way into Trump’s good graces.

I am shocked, SHOCKED!!, that there is corruption taking place in Trump World….

In the waning day of Trump’s presidency, he fired off executive orders that purported to bar TikTok from the US versions of the Apple and Google app stores on the grounds that it was controlled by the People’s Republic of China government. This was characterized in some quarters as an order “banning TikTok,” but the practical upshot was to try to get it sold to an American company. Then Joe Biden won the election and withdrew the order on the grounds that it was unlikely to hold up in court. But Biden also continued a Commerce Department investigation into the company, and TikTok reached a deal whereby user data would be stored on servers in Texas rather than in China. This didn’t fully resolve the issue — the anti-TikTok movement retained some support in congress, I wrote about how Trump had this right and data privacy was not the real issue, and the Biden White House seemed torn between their concern about TikTok’s relationship with the Chinese government and their worry that, on a political level, they didn’t want to be seen as shutting TikTok down. 

This week, though, the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced a properly drafted bipartisan bill that attracted unanimous support in committee and that the White House says they will sign. The authors, this time, have been very careful to say that their intention is not to ban TikTok but to force its sale to a company that isn’t subject to CCP control. And while it’s a long road from Energy and Commerce to enactment, the support really is incredibly broad. 

Except now Trump suddenly loves TikTok:

As Yglesias says, you can go to Axios for a blow-by-blow on how and why Trump did a 180. Or you can skip to the Cliff Notes version:

He did it for the money. Duh…. Who could’ve seen that coming, eh?

With Donald Trump, it’s always about the money, but especially now when he’s facing more than a half-BILLION dollars in judgments against him for being an unrepentant rapist and a lousy, cheating businessman.

Yeah, karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?

For years, Billionaire Jeff Yass has been a major donor to conservative causes and Republican politicians. He’s also a major investor in TikTok, which means he could lose a lot of money if TikTok gets shut down. But more to the point, he also stands to lose a lot of money any time the authoritarian Chinese government wants to make him lose money. He’s under their thumb and has been spending freely on pro-TikTok advocacy and leaning hard on lawmakers. Right before Trump’s flip-flop on TikTok, he had a big sit-down with Yass and the Yass-backed Club for Growth, and got some kind of financial commitment from both parties. Then, he started publicly praising Yass.

And why might Trump be “back in love” with the Club for Growth? The answer, as it turns out, is ridiculously simple:

That’s the dark side of Trump’s “transactional” approach to politics. You can buy him off on basically any topic. You can do it with campaign contributions, but you can also do it opaquely through his empire of clubs and golf courses and real estate holdings. Or you can do it through his family ties. There are many ways to bribe Trump, and that means that even when you’re inclined to say he got something right — as I was inclined to say about his stance on TikTok — you can’t expect him to hold to it.

Every relationship in Donald Trump’s life is transactional.

• What’s in it for me?

• How am I going to benefit?

• How much will I make?

• Is this a one-off or a long-term financial arrangement?

• Can I play golf?

There’s probably more to it, but you get the idea. It’s not so much that Trump’s corrupt; that should hardly come as a shock to anyone. The man’s always been for sale. What’s offensive, but not at all surprising, is that this corruption continued while he was President.

Elect a grifter, expect to get grifted.

So, TikTok is no longer an existential and ever-present threat to Our Way of Life ©, at least insofar as Orange Jesus is concerned. There are only two sides to this issue, and he’s now shamelessly occupied both. Well played, young buck….

The question I have is not IF Donald Trump is corrupt. That’s long since been established. No, my question concerns much Jeff Yass had to cough up for Trump to “fall back in love” with TikTok again? How much is love worth these days? Is that love conditional? Does it have a time limit on it, or does it have to be renewed every 60-90 days?

Because, while love can be bought (some might know it as “prostitution,” but that seems so cynical), there’s still the question of whether TikTok is slowly consuming the minds of our young ‘uns and turning them into obedient, brain-dead communist-bots.

Honestly, given some of the kids I run across these days, that might be a significant improvement. Just sayin’….

Is TikTok, in fact, “poisoning the minds” of a generation of children, as Katie Britt said in her State of the Union response? If it is, it’s probably not a deliberate Chinese plot. There’s a lot of evidence that heavy use of social media is bad for mental health, and particularly disruptive to school age kids. That’s not Xi Jinping’s fault, and it wouldn’t be fixed via sale to an American owner. But sporadically leaked evidence out of China suggests that TikTok does, in fact, engage in censorship on topics the Chinese government deems sensitive. 

How much censorship? Nobody knows. Because the nature of this sort of app is that you can’t tell what kind of thumb is on the algorithmic scales. When I searched TikTok for content related to Uyghurs, three out of the four top videos I got were revisionist accounts about how the West has this all wrong and Uyghurs are treated well in China. One of the four, though, was conventional human rights content. On the one hand, that is definitely less censorship than you would see on a Chinese social media network. On the other hand, it does seem like the app is promoting Chinese propaganda.

Of course, most of the large social media platforms are promoting propaganda of one sort or another. In most cases, it’s the price of doing business in countries with repressive political regimes. Facebook can’t allow the posting of content in China that’s blatantly critical of the Chinese government, etc.

Compromises have to be made, some more stomach-churning than others. Capitalism ain’t pretty, knowhutimean? It’s where principles go to die.

And then there’s the “Anything Joe Biden supports I will unalterably oppose with my last dying breath,” as

Oliver Wiseman

tells us.

Biden is in favor of forcing ByteDance to sell—he has said if the bill passes, he will sign it into law. And Trump? Trump is passionately and suddenly opposed. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!,” said Trump in a post on Truth Social last week. (That isn’t right: the bill gives ByteDance 165 days to sell TikTok before banning it from app stores.)

In this, Trump is part of a strange coalition that includes libertarian right-wingers like Senator Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, Squad members like Ilhan Omar and AOC, Tucker Carlson, the Cato Institute, and the ACLU. 

Hmm…any time Trump is on the same team as AOC and Ilhan Ohmar, you might want to ensure your apocalypse insurance is up to date.

As I mentioned earlier, money talks, and the reality that Biden supports the TikTok ban just makes it easier for Trump to ride into town on a white steed…as $20 bills softly flutter to the ground in his slipstream.

Wait…”Zuckerschmuck?” That might be the closest Trump has ever come to eliciting a laugh from anyone. He’s not there yet, not by a long shot…but at least he moved the needle.

When all is said and done, though, the oldsters in Congress don’t have to worry about not knowing fuck-all about social media. A good chunk of TikTok’s users aren’t old enough to vote, so they can go pound sand, yeah?

And everyone else? Well, they’re just a bunch of whiny, entitled brats making money off of something nobody understands. Maybe they need to get a REAL job, you know, like something they can work 40 or more hours a week at and be miserable for the rest of their life like every other American.

Yeah, go work in a bank or something and leave the heavy lifting to the adults, whydon’tcha??

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