What they aren’t showing on Fox News

Reminder: Don’t forget to vote today in WI and FL’s 1st & 6th districts!

Should the Democrats have seen this coming? Well, lots of people have been screaming that this was going to happen. So they certainly could have figured it out in advance. But remember, most of the political power players involved don’t really understand social media. Trump included.

There has been bipartisan flip-flopping, hypocrisy, and ulterior motives when it comes to TikTok, with the (current) end result that the app is now being openly used to promote Trump to as many as 170 million Americans as he prepares to take office.

TikTok has leaned even heavier on its open support of Trump now that the ban is going into effect. And it’s worth noting that while TikTok was originally used to embarrass Trump in 2020, he became more popular on the app in 2024 than any other U.S. politician.

Trump also stopped posting on TikTok the day he won the election in 2024. But TikTok saw Trump as its only pathway to continue existing in the U.S. CEO Shou Chew met with Trump and showed him how successful he was on the app. Chew was invited to the inauguration.

That law passed and Biden signed it in April 2024. But both he and Trump joined TikTok to campaign for the presidency, and Trump said he had changed his mind about the app. Biden’s admin didn’t change its tune, despite using the app, until a couple days ago.

Republicans in Congress in particular had been trying for years to move against TikTok because of its Chinese parent company. In late 2023-early 2024, while TikTok was used to channel massive pro-Palestinian sentiment, a serious bipartisan congressional effort organized to ban it.

Just a reminder of some of the context around the TikTok ban: In 2020, Trump tried to ban it via executive order a couple months after K-pop fans used it to organize fake signups to Trump’s Tulsa rally, which led him to publicly overestimate how large the crowd size would be.