Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/09/maga-media-takeover-tiktok/684351/

American mass media has been transformed in these early months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

We’re about 35 weeks into a term that will last for 173 more, and in that time, we have seen a tech titan gut a once-great newspaper in an apparent act of capitulation to the commander in chief, government accounts gleefully spreading hateful memes on X (the far-right platform owned by a billionaire tech oligarch), a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump against The New York Times (and quickly dismissed by the judge as “superfluous”), and, of course, the assault on free speech carried out by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman. Big things can happen very quickly.

Here is what seems to be next: TikTok’s U.S. operations are reportedly on the cusp of being sold to a group that includes Trump allies, led by yet another tech baron, Larry Ellison. Although the deal is not yet complete, the White House has told reporters that the arrangement will result in the social app’s algorithm being leased to a consortium led by Ellison’s company, Oracle, and by the investors Andreessen Horowitz and Silver Lake.

This promises to resolve long-standing concerns that the Chinese-owned TikTok might give an adversarial foreign government the capacity to influence and monitor the social-media behavior of U.S. residents. But at the rate things are going today, we should be far less worried about what foreign governments could do with our social-media information than about how our own government might abuse it. (A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to my request for comment.)

There has been no indication that Trump or his administration would have direct control over the platform. But with close allies in command, it would seem that there’s a clear line for the president to influence and bend the platform to his will. One thing that social-media platforms are already tremendously adept at is building “look-alike” models of users. This was Facebook’s big advertising breakthrough a decade ago—the 2016 Trump campaign figured out how to acquire donors by showing campaign ads to people with similar social-media likes and preferences as the existing base of MAGA supporters. What happens if social media’s data-gathering and profiling engine is turned not to selling merch or promoting political rhetoric, but to profiling enemies?

Just this week, Trump issued an executive order designating “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization (despite the fact that antifa is not an organization at all). Imagine if the administration asks its newly anointed TikTok leadership to pinpoint a set of supposedly hateful, far-left media outlets, and then generate lists of social-media users who view, share, and comment on such media. Or imagine if it asks Ellison et al. to identify clusters of people who view and share videos attacking ICE, criticizing “Alligator Alcatraz,” or protecting the undocumented. Look-alike models are a danger in the hands of a budding authoritarian state.

https://archive.is/8UKhs