Five Years ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order warning Americans about the potential for TikTok, the popular Chinese social media app, to be used as a dangerous surveillance tool. He wrote then that the app’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information—potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.” Am I the only one who senses a certain amount of envy revealed in these lines? Trump, always an admirer of what he considers strong leaders, is obviously very jealous that the Chinese President Xi Jinping has a tool that could do all this and he, as President of the US does not.
The basic concern expressed here is not entirely unwarranted. All social media apps, Facebook, “X” etc., are all potentially able to do that. So it matters a great deal, who ultimately controls this data.
Congress agreed that in the case of TikTok this was a real danger and passed the TikTok ban as part of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April 2024.The law gave TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, 270 days—until January 19, 2025—to divest its ownership of TikTok or face a ban from U.S. app stores and hosting services. That deadline has been extended unilaterally by Donald Trump several times.
Now, finally, Trump has succeeded in forcing the Chinese to cede control over TikTok to, wait for it, MAGA mega billionaire Larry Ellison and a number of other Trump cronies.
We all can sleep better now. The Chinese no longer control such a powerful tool that might be used to excert influence in the Untied States, especially in the run-up to elections. This tool, i.e.TikTok, is now firmly under US control.
That “US” in this case means Larry Ellison, Trump and a few other MAGA cronies does not necessarily make me feel much better. To borrow from Donald Trump himself, the app’s “data collection threatens to allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information—potentially allowing Donald Trump and the Republican Party to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, conduct corporate espionage.”