It's absolutely a stunt and you can tell BECAUSE of nothing more than the date.
This happened today. Sunday, January 19th, 2025.
Trump has no Presidential authority to do anything until after being sworn into office on January 20th, 2025. That's tomorrow. Nothing he says or does until after he is sworn in has any legal effect or power.
These actions are not based on any policy, they are based purely on a promise, if that. There's nothing actually happening right now.
He's not even promising NOT to ban tiktok. He's simply promising that he will make an executive order, tomorrow, extending the time until the ban comes into effect, allowing more time to negotiate.
There is a more important question of WHY there is this back and forth over Tiktok which, when all is said and done, is not particularly valuable to US governmental policy in and of itself.
The value of Tiktok is the user base.
TikTok has 170 million U.S. users.
The number of people who voted in the latest US election in November is 156,302,318.
TikTok has more users, only counting here in the US, than the number of people who voted here in the US.
That's why it is important to Trump to dictate how the treatment of TikTok is seen in regards to himself. It's something that people will be highly aware of in numbers that materially matter and may have serious effects on his political capital and legacy. He's promoting himself saving TikTok for the exact same reason he wanted to ban TikTok: political power.
Tiktok is promoting him saving it for the same reasons. To praise Trump is to ingratiate yourself with him. It's a very cheap way to buy protection. Give him the credit for their optional return to accessibility after their optional shutdown before they were legally forced to, and they just got him to work for them.
His opening offer is already half what the law is currently set at: sell to an American company or be shut down. By playing up to him and giving him credit and his ability to gain social influence on that audience, they may have potentially saved 50% which is his initial thought: 50% ownership by an American company. It probably IS the best deal they've ever gotten. Misllocate credit in one post to potentially save 50% of their company. That is a good business decision no matter how you look at it.
Meanwhile, Trump gets something for nothing because he cannot legally use an executive order to override or cancel a law that congress has passed. So he just got to look like a savior to more people than the total who voted in this election that put him in his second term, for nothing more than saying he promises to do something that he can't actually do. Any way you look at it, that's a pretty sweet deal for him. Even sweeter because Trump's political team is on TikTok with a 15 million user follower base. That's 15 million people immediately grateful for him returning their status quo AND already set up to listen to what he has to say. And it will probably expand because of this.
So TikTok gains a lot. Trump gains a lot. The question is who loses out on this deal? And how?
Hmmmm... well, the users get back exactly what they had before. So that doesn't look like losing out on the face of it. Except now they're getting that under the impression that Trump gave it to them. So, you can argue that it is like a time-share lecture deal. Yeah, you get the free vacation AT THE COST of having to listen to a sales pitch. It's not really free, just cheaper than the alternative. Same here. It's not a free return to the status quo. It's a return to what the user base had as an alternative to a promise of nothing in exchange for favorably listening to the pitch that Trump has done something for them when he hasn't actually done anything yet.
And, so far, no one has done anything about the original issue that led to the ban in the first place. It is still controlled by the same company and still has control over how users experience the content while still having access to user information that is useful for social prediction and influence. Everyone worried about the misuse and potential misuse of data aggregation by a foreign power (because we're fine with it when we do it but not when someone else does it to us) now looks like the bad guys who just wanted to end fun instead of having any valid concerns for the safety of the TikTok userbase which is actually one of the things that they are all supposed to be doing, instead of just farting around.
It's mostly useless. Except that it makes for good political theater to those who refuse to tune in and accept the other political theater that is going on.
The user base's access to TikTok is TikTok's access to its user base. And it just made a play, in multiple senses of the word. Pretty blatantly exactly what people with legitimate fears of social media influence have been afraid of: that social media will put its fingers on the scale and push one side over the other.
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