If you have been online in the past few weeks, it is inevitable that you will have heard about the US TikTok ban, which took effect on 19th January. And yet, less than 24 hours later, American users were flooding back onto the platform, after freshly inaugurated President Trump swept in with a 90-day extension before the ban set in. But when Trump starts looking like the hero of the story, it’s time to worry.
It would be misleading to discuss banning TikTok without mentioning that it was Trump who presented the idea in the first place, concerned by the app’s supposed links to the Chinese Government. Don’t be fooled by the false notions that Trump has ceased to be a China-Hawk, even less so, by his absolute commitment to free speech.
By temporarily reviving TikTok, Trump has turned the app into a pawn in his political game, and users have been quick to realise the potentially detrimental impacts of this. Speaking to The Independent, content creator James Rose believes that TikTok will “bend and sway to the whims of people’s political agendas,” and other creators even fear that the app may be convinced to change its algorithms in an attempt to bargain with Trump.
Already, returning American users have seen features like live streaming becoming harder or impossible to access, and the content they can view restricted or controlled. Perhaps this is a glimpse at what the future of the app could be like if it is forced into bargaining with Trump to remain accessible. This certainly doesn’t look like protecting free speech.
It is undeniable that Trump’s political agenda is synonymous with right-wing politics. If his intention with TikTok is to create an app to cater to his political agenda, then this is hugely unnerving, especially given the recent upsurge in far-right political parties in the Western world. Such influence on a platform as large as TikTok could materialise as a threat to both liberalism and democracy.
TikTok has become a pawn in a political power struggle, and the impacts of the Supreme Court’s ban and Trump’s subsequent revival sets a dangerous precedent. One must ask, how free is the supposed free speech that Trump is vying to protect, when it is inextricably wrapped up in the (not so) covert political power struggles behind TikTok? The app may have survived for the time being, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the larger power struggle occurring here. Social media companies have become political weapons, and it is imperative that users look beneath the screen.
“Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.