from the everything-is-propaganda-now dept
After years of hyperventilation about TikTok’s impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, TikTok is likely being sold to a bunch of Trump’s billionaire technofascist buddies who don’t believe in privacy and want to use TikTok to spread right wing propaganda. Bang up job all around, especially to all the befuddled Democrats whose hysteria about the app helped Trump seal the deal.
TikTok’s new owners will include Rupert Murdoch (responsible for creating Fox News, the most effective mass media right wing propaganda platform ever) and Trump bestie Larry Ellison, who is in the process of turning CBS News into basically the same thing via his nepo baby son and Bari Weiss.
Normally you’d want to be a little subtle about the plan to turn TikTok into a pro-Trump and pro-Netanyahu propaganda machine to avoid scaring off customers, but that’s not Trump’s style. So last week he basically just blurted out the whole plan, then insisted he was just “joking”:
“Trump signed an executive order to “save” TikTok, while supposedly joking that he’d like to censor influencers by tweaking the algorithm so that content is “100 percent MAGA.”
“Everyone is going to be treated fairly,” the president added—seemingly covering his tracks as critics warn that TikTok under US ownership could soon carry a right-wing bias, perhaps going the way of Twitter after Elon Musk took over and rebranded it as X.”
Yes, “perhaps.”
From Twitter and the Washington Post to CBS News, the right wing billionaire tendency to buy up major media properties and convert them into right wing propaganda and bullshit machines has not been subtle. Yet, as the framing of this Ars piece makes clear, the press still seems somewhat confused as to whether TikTok will be any sort of reliable source of information (spoiler: it won’t) under far right wing billionaire ownership.
TikTok under Bytedance ownership certainly raised privacy, propaganda, and national security concerns. But under Bytedance the platform at least tried to behave so it could continue operating in the U.S. With Trump having dismantled all our privacy, NatSec, and fraud regulators, the new U.S. ownership of TikTok will see arguably fewer regulatory constraints on their worst impulses than ever.
Murdoch clearly wants a modern media extension of his existing Fox News empire given his core audience is dying off. Ellison, a staunch supporter of Netanyahu and his industrialized mass murder of children, clearly wants to leverage TikTok as a new media extension for whatever fresh hell he and Bari Weiss are building over at CBS. I’d expect ample authoritarian apologia.
To be clear the deal hasn’t been fully finalized yet. It’s still not clear if the deal will meet the legal requirements of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, especially given there seems to be some ongoing debate over who’ll exactly own the underlying algorithm. There will likely be some opportunities for activists and lawyers to throw sand in the gears.
But make no mistake: if this deal goes through TikTok will absolutely be headed the way of Twitter under Elon Musk. They’ll likely try to leave things much the same for a 6-12 months to pretend that’s not going to be the case, but I suspect that, ultimately, its use for right wing propaganda will be obvious.
Creating an internet full of wall-to-wall racist and corporatist right wing agitprop was always the end game of MAGA’s bogus “Conservative censorship” and “we support antitrust reform now” claims, it was never remotely subtle, and you can’t say you weren’t warned, repeatedly.
You’d like to think that the conversion of TikTok into a far right wing safe space will cause a mass exodus of ethical people off of the platform, but as we’ve seen with Twitter (especially when it comes to journalists’ continued use of a website owned by an overt white supremacist) that’s clearly not really something you can truly rely on.
You’d also like to think that the hijacking of TikTok will create the opportunity for innovators to create a better, more ethical short-form video platform not owned by assholes actively cheering on the destruction of foundational democracy. Here too, time will tell.
Their goal is obvious but as some are quick to point out: their success is far from guaranteed. Remember what happened with Rupert Murdoch and MySpace? AT&T’s attempted domination of video? These sorts of domination plays, especially in mass modern media, never quite go the way rich brunchlords planned, and it’s not like Oracle executives have any sort of serious experience with consumer-facing product success, much less any understanding of modern media.
That said, you’d need to define “success.” The billionaire right wing architects of this new modern era right wing propaganda bullhorn (that may soon be comprised of Fox, CNN, Sinclair, TikTok, Twitter, and countless other media properties) have no limit of money to burn on profit-losing propaganda ventures in a country that just took a hatchet to any remaining financial or consumer protection regulators.
They may never have the competency to actually execute, but given the already extremely shaky status of journalism, the media, and informed consensus, I think emphatic alarmism remains the right response to the grand, unsubtle mass media plans of our shittiest billionaires.
Filed Under: authoritarians, censorship, disinformation, free speech, larry ellison, propaganda, rupert murdoch, social media
Companies: bytedance, fox news, news corp., oracle, tiktok
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