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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody. Tim Miller from the Bulwark here with my buddy Andrew Egger, author of the Morning Shots newsletter, which you damn well better be subscribed to. Over@the bulwark.com we want to talk about the White House joining TikTok. I'm going to admit it, I'm a TikTok consumer. I'm more of a user. You know, you see me producing to you here on YouTube and other platforms, but I'm a consumer on TikTok. I know I shouldn't be. The Chinese are spying on me, but I'm weak. But the issue here, I think was more to do with, like, the law, the fact that we don't have laws in this country anymore. Anymore. I guess. I guess the laws are just whatever Donald Trump wishes. Because the White House launched their account on Tuesday with Donald Trump saying, I am your voice, posted a bunch of videos. It did have some. They were trolled a lot. But there's one little problem here, which was there was a law that was passed that required TikTok to stop operating by January 19th of this year, nine months ago, eight months ago, who knows what month it is? And that law was signed, the Supreme Court ruled that it was legal 9 to 0. And I guess the Supreme Court doesn't have an army to enforce the law because Donald Trump's just like, whatevs. What do you make of all this, Andrew?
- [01:19]
B
Yeah, so it was about seven months ago, actually, Tim, that this law was supposed to go into effect. Basically when Congress wrote this law last year, when Joe Biden signed it into law last year, there was a provision that the White House could delay its implementation one time, one time, while they were supposed to be trying to find a way around it. The way the law has worked is that TikTok would essentially be banned in the US unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, were to divest from it. Because US policymakers said they have way too much control over the algorithms here. It's basically they kind of have a humongous part of US discourse in sort of a stranglehold that they can, they can put their thumb on the scale in different ways. And so the idea was, unless ByteDance sells to a non, you know, a non Chinese company, probably a US owned company, TikTok would be delisted from app stores. And, and so what, what we're seeing now, it's kind of funny because this is. This is like the most visible way that the White House has kind of thumbed their nose at that thing. This is not like the illegal thing. Right. It's not. It's not like it's illegal for them to be on there. Anybody can be on TikTok. Anybody can have a TikTok account, create content on there, consume content on there. It's not supposed to be in app stores. Right. So the illegal thing is the thing they've been doing all along, up until now, and this is just sort of like the cherry on top, because Trump continues to say they're gonna find a buyer.
- [02:39]
A
I mean, I guess. I mean, it's not, I guess, particularly illegal for Trump to get on there, but it's like just in the spirit of a rule of law country, you would think that the President of the United States, who has sworn an oath to uphold the laws of the country would do that, rather than flouting the law that has been, you know, passed by bipartisan, by Congress, signed, affirmed by the Supreme Court. And he's just like, you know, waving his little stubby middle finger at it, like, whatevs, I'm gonna get on here because I want the kids to like me.
- [03:10]
B
Yeah.
- [03:10]
A
Like, literally the rationale is like, I want the kids to like me is like, literally the rationale for not enforcing the law here.
- [03:17]
B
And he has said that explicitly all along. I mean, like, right after the 2024 election. It's like one of the things he came away from that where whereas, you know, he very famously won younger voters in greater numbers than in either of his, you know, previous attempts to run for president. And one of the things he came away from that with was, man, this TikTok thing is really working out well for me. And he said that, he said that. He's like, you know, we love TikTok. TikTok was great for us last time around. And so from very early on, there was this explicit sort of like, quid pro quo of, I really think this thing's helping me out. And so I'm not going to. I'm certainly not, not going to blow up this, this good thing I have going. We're going to. Going to slow roll this thing. He's still been trying to negotiate. His people have still been trying to negotiate a sale that may still happen, but. But. But certainly not going to the. The hardball nuclear option for that. And now what we're seeing with this is just sort of making that arrangement even more explicit. Right. It's not just, like, ambiguously good for me. He's now going there to. To, you know, make the sale entirely.
- [04:14]
A
While that is all happening, I feel like this has been underplayed like there is some chatter out there, at least in social media, that TikTok is, you know, that the mysterious algorithm, mysterious decision makers are doing things to make Donald Trump happy while he is helping them to flout the law. Our guy Hawk, who you may have seen here on this YouTube, I did an interview with Hawk, who's. Who's a big TikToker, said that he was getting feedback like that from TikTok that accounts like his that criticize Trump should be careful in various ways. There's this again. I mean, this is public. It's not rumor. This guy posted this. His name is Elijah Daniel. He has 600,000 followers. He's a big account. He says that he made a video saying that TikTok is working with the Trump administration on suppressing anti Trump content. He offered some evidence of that, but he didn't even mention Trump's name. He was doing the thing that the youth do where like, instead of saying suicide, they say unalive and shit like that. And I don't know. I don't know what he said instead of Trump, maybe grump or something. And. And he was banned from the app until 2032. He says he shows a screenshot of this, which I don't have any reason to believe is not legitimate. You know, I mean, it sure seems like this is something to be concerned about, like the White House potentially doing what they've done, you know, much more publicly with these big TV networks. Frankly, TikTok has more influence over the culture than like, CBS News. No offense to our friends at the CBS Nightly News, but, I mean, Trump bullying TikTok into suppressing critical content while he extrajudicially, judicially keeps the app open. Seems bad.
- [06:01]
B
Isn't that just such a grim picture that policymakers were so in a twist about the idea that China's government was going to be sort of oppressively monkeying with the algorithm, so much so that they signed this extremely disruptive bill that in theory would have blown up this insanely popular app if they didn't get a sale. Obviously, that hasn't happened for the reasons we've discussed, but that now it's not just China, who in theory can be doing that anytime they feel like it with very little visibility from anything. And we know it does happen. All kinds of things that are sort of buzzwords for censorship from the Chinese government just can't appear on TikTok and don't surface in searches on TikTok. But now it's our guys. It's good old Liberal democracy, US Of A. Doing the exact same thing. You know, reportedly here, of, of. And there's no, I mean, like, what reason would you, would you have to look at that story and say that doesn't make any sense? Like that, that, that surely that can't be. I mean, it's totally in keeping with.
- [07:01]
A
Yeah, like I said, I'm just saying I don't have, I don't have hard evidence of it. But like, it is in the spirit of the way that Donald Trump has acted across multiple verticals with universities and other big media companies and, and he has leverage here over TikTok in the same way he did over Paramount and all that. So, I mean, people are reporting that this is happening. I don't, I mean, you know what, I think it would be incumbent upon them to demonstrate otherwise at this point. But, you know, it's funny you mentioned that, Andrew, because, like, during the whole TikTok banning debate, I was like a swing voter on that. You know, I kind of reluctantly came down on the side of being for the TikTok ban. I think had, God forbid I've been a member of Congress, but I kind of mixed views on it. And one of the, one of the arguments that was made by, like, the don't ban TikTok side, that at the time Joe Biden was president, I was very dismissive of was this idea that, like, why would you single out TikTok here for this behavior? Like, sure, it's not good that the Chinese government is doing that, but how is that any different than Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk putting their finger on the scale? I mean, you know, and like that argument, which I rejected with intensity in 2023, 2024, is seeming a little stronger today, I guess, than it was back then. I mean, it's still not good to want to have, you know, have, you know, the youth be influenced by something that the Chinese Communist Party can, can monkey with, but it's hard to single it out, I guess, as a unique threat.
- [08:34]
B
Yeah, but, but I think I get, I get what you're saying with that. At the same time, I think the way I'd push back is that there's always been sort of friction between government and corporations, even here. Right. I mean, like, like it's long standing sort of like civil liberties stuff about how much, you know, tech companies are going to cooperate with law enforcement investigations and help help the FBI get into a terrorist's phone and stuff like that and that, you know, there's, there's always push and pull. There's always tension, there's always tensions about speech. And you know, how much governments are going to pressure corporations to take down speech. They don't like all that kind of stuff. I think one big difference here is that we are still in an environment where this is a corporation that really answers to Americans in no way. Right. I mean, it's a Chinese owned and operated corporation that plays in the US market. Wouldn't want to lose a bunch of market share over here or anything like that. But it's not like it's a little different than something like, sure, it's still different or whatever, where those guys have to go out into the world and face their fellow Americans or something like that. And I think, you know, TikTok is a lot more willing to just be like, you know, whatever you say, Mr. Donald Trump, sir, that sounds great than like, than even, you know, our currently obsequious crop of tech titans are. Not that there's like no merit to what you're saying, but I think that like, there's like an extra zest to it when it's.
- [09:53]
A
I agree with you. I guess my broader point. I agree with you. Look, the Chinese Communist Party is still bad and we should not be giving them unfettered access to millions of Americans to, to influence the way that they think. I think that that should be a pretty popular position, though others will disagree. I guess my point is that we're clouding the distinctions less that there is not a distinction, but like the behavior of the American government and the behavior of our big tech leaders are making that. It harder for you to make that argument than maybe it might have been five years ago.
- [10:28]
B
That's absolutely the case. And to just say one more thing about this, like, I was kind of playing like a little game with myself as we were preparing to tape this. I was like trying to go through the different parts of the original TikTok critique. And one that we haven't really talked about is just the like insane access to your data that that app reportedly, according to people who know a lot more about these sorts of things than I do, apparently it scrapes like ungodly amounts of data from your phone, much more so than many other comparable apps. Even though everybody's trafficking in data to a certain extent. I was like, is there, is there any part of this story that is not like somehow like been been mirrored and duplicated under the first six months of the Trump administration? And then I was thinking about like, well, I mean, that that's very similar to what has already happened, you know, with, with Elon and Doge and their access to not just sort of proprietary app data, but government data and, and, you know, Peter Thiel and Palantir and like, you know, it's like, it's the whole thing. Like, all of these sort of like, real intense civil liberty concerns that people have had for a number of years now about TikTok are all being sort of reduplicated in one way or another by this administration and its own sort of homegrown tech overlords. So that's kind of a cool thing, too.
- [11:42]
A
Last thing. JVL likes to take us to the most dystopian place always. And so I'm going to stand in for him. There is, like, a little bit of an ominousness of this. Like, I don't know, I feel like for some reason, because the TikTok band, like, lives in this unique space where it's like, nobody's really that excited about it and like, there are all these counterveaning and countervailing interests and nobody's really unhappy that he hasn't, like. Like there's not this big groundswell of people that are, like, ban it now. Right. Like, even the people who voted for it, like, some of them are kind of happy that he didn't. He's not banning it. Right. Like, so because of the uniqueness of that situation, like, we're not getting the constitutional crisis talk that we were getting during, like, the Abrego Garcia case or these other cases where, like, Donald Trump was just saying fuck you to the Supreme Court and, and the ruling. But I don't know, just the fact that he can just take a Supreme Court ruling 9, 0 and just say don't care about it does not augur optimistically for when that is a, let's say, election case in the future. I don't know. Does that not worry you a little bit?
- [12:50]
B
It worries me a lot, yeah. When you put it that way, it is certainly worrisome. And yeah, it's not just that. The fact that there's like, no gigantic constituency that's like, foaming at the mouth for this to happen immediately. It's the fact. It's. It's that. But it's also the fact that in theory, it's still happening soon. Question mark. Right. Because they are supposedly still sort of like actively negotiating toward. Toward a sale. And so what. What? This ends up being one of those stories, what, like so many Trump stories where people just kind of string themselves along on the Hopium of, like, well, you know, maybe if we stop paying, if we just kind of put our heads in the sand on this one, eventually it will go away sort of quietly and seamlessly without there having to be any kind of, like, confrontation or crisis. Those rarely work out. Could work out here, but. But, but, but. Yeah. So so far, no end in sight to the strings along. And obviously the White House, as we. Which is the whole point of the video is, is just sort of proceeding as though, as though they will. They will never take it down. So that's.
- [13:51]
A
Well, if you are on TikTok and the White House's content comes across your. For your page, feel free to let them know what you think about it. You know, give them a little bit of, you know, give a little bit of the what for. And that's the best we can do at this point as citizens, which is complain about our government on a Chinese spyware app. Everybody subscribe to the feed either way, whichever side of that argument, you're on. And we'll be back here soon.