In the short amount of time between TikTok going dark and President Musk signing so many Executive Orders that his medical staff are looking for signs of carpal tunnel, two things became glaringly apparent.
The first was a glimpse at what the rush to fill the international power vacuum of America’s disappearance would look like:
@lovedeep.sr HEAVY ON CELSIUS #america #theamericansaregone #thebadmanisgone #theyrethekiller #tiktok #tiktokban #rednote #celsius and no idk what im doing in the video I was ****
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The second is that if Congress’s dire need to protect American citizens from having their data stolen was a legitimate concern, something had to change in the span of a day, right?
@probably_notchris
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If any changes have been made they’ve been on the hush, but folks have noticed some pretty telling hat tips and changes to the algorithm. It started with TikTok glazing President Trump:
this was all a stunt to make trump look good
— poppy 曆 (@imnotpopbase) January 19, 2025
Once the app’s functionality was restored, people quickly noticed that things weren’t how they used to be just a day before:
@gollymorgansmalley tiktok tinktok tiktokban comedy
@probably_notchris #greenscreen wut
There seemed to be a wave of censorship of words and phrases dependent on the country the user was in:
You cannot even search the word “fascism” on TikTok anymore. People are searching for info on Palestine, the L.A. wildfires, and even the Holocaust and being told to look out for “misinformation.”
We’re watching censorship and propaganda in real time. pic.twitter.com/XFOhd9z7vy
— Gabrielle A. Perry, MPH (@GeauxGabrielle) January 20, 2025
apparently this is a bit inconsistent depending on the phrasing used, but remains something that is (as far as i can tell) exclusive to Americans, and IS still part of a blatant effort to censor progressive discussion.
most incompetent fascist media takeover award goes to…拾拾
— Karl Max 襁 (@KarlMaxxed) January 20, 2025
Trump & Co. are generally the first ones to rail against the evils of Communism and collectivization, but Trump’s approach to allowing TikTok to get around the ban looks a lot like advocating for a state-run social media platform:
Trump's position on TikTok is clear. A 50% joint venture or it closes in 90 days pic.twitter.com/CQKRdow3k8
— Russell (@__Russellm) January 21, 2025
To be fair, Trump’s language shifts from the US would be a 50% partner with TikTok to floating the option that the 50% share could be privately owned by rich people, but you don’t have to look further than Elon Musk — owner of Twitter and spearhead of the “Department Of Government Efficiency” — to see that the veil between billionaire ownership and state ownership isn’t really that thick.
So what’s there to do in the interim? Many Americans who made the Great Migration (can we retire the phrase “TikTok refugee”) to Xiaohongshu are opting to stay there rather than move back to NewTok, but that solution will only work so long as Congress allows Americans to continue using foreign apps. Americans can forgo TikTok along with Twitter/X to take their speech back to Facebook, Instagram, or Threads, but that’s not doing much more than choosing which right-leaning billionaire you want to be doing the censorship. Bluesky looks to be the last bastion, but who knows how long those walls will stand.
There’s a mic drop moment in Iron Man 2 where Tony Stark proudly declares that he has effectively privatized world peace. Given how advanced his arms were, he was right — you’d have to either buy your weapons from him or buy from shoddy imitators who dyed their meth to look like his. Between the billionaires who own social media and Donald Trump’s pen, the state and the right wing have effectively privatized our speech, shape our opinions, and regulate our dissent. And to think, all of this happened on MLK Day.
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.