He's Got The Whole World In His (Itty-Bitty) Hands
How Donald Trump can use a provision of Congress's Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act to evade the TikTok ban
Image credit: Tomas Ragina/Shutterstock
It seems to be T-6 to a slow fade for the popular, phone-based, video app TikTok, a federal ban set to take effect the day before Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States.
For those of you who have not followed this dispute closely, “ban” is shorthand for a slightly more complex road to TikTok’s destruction. In February, 2023, citing national security concerns, federal workers were given 30 days to remove the app from government-issued phones. In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill that required ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, to sell the app to a United States buyer, or have it outlawed in the United States. This means that the Apple and Google Play stores will no longer make it available for download or update. While it won’t be illegal to have TikTok on your phone, the app will degrade over time and eventually cease functioning.
There is, of course, always the possibility that this could change. ByteDance has not negotiated a sale, and the company—along with a group of users who make content for profit—has appealed this law to the United States Supreme Court. TikTok et. al. has argued its position as a First Amendment case (in other words, that the ban denies its users a forum for speech and creativity); while the Department of Justice seeks to uphold the law on national security grounds. The Court heard the case last Friday and will presumably issue some kind of ruling before next Sunday’s deadline.
Experts predict that the SCOTUS ruling will not be friendly to TikTok, but that doesn’t mean that the law will ultimately succeed in its purpose. Even I think the free speech argument is a weak one, since United States history is littered with state repression of speech during purported national emergencies. Yet, the Court has other options, as it often does: returning the case to a lower court on procedural grounds, or striking portions of the law and leaving others intact.
Importantly, perhaps even for the SCOTUS ruling, incoming President Donald J. Trump now opposes the ban, having signed an executive order in August 2020 that did just that. Why? Because he has learned he is very popular on it. In addition, close to 70% of American teenagers are on it, making its propaganda value for the United States right significant.
Early signs suggest that the Trump family is already testing TikTok’s value to them. Now that son Barron is 18, Melania Trump seems to have lifted the lid on his public appearances on behalf of the family: videos featuring the NYU freshman are common, as is content about various Trump grandchildren. The content frequently refers to the Trump family as America’s royal family, Barron as a “prince,” and includes a viral video (the release of which would make most 18-year-olds cringe), in which a tiny, school-bound Barron displays a child-sized briefcase and announces: “I like my sooooootcase.”
Arguably, TikTok has the capacity to amplify the family brand among younger Americans in a way that a stuffy old man in a suit twerking to YMCA does not, and gather data on them as future voters.
Trump’s options under the law include staying its enforcement for 90 days while ByteDance, now with a knife at its throat, negotiates a sale. Just today, Frank McCourt, executive chairman of McCourt Global, and the founder of the data research and policy institute, Project Liberty announced that he is putting together an investor group to purchase all of ByteDance.
During this period, Trump could also try to persuade a Republican-controlled Congress to rescind the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (or PAFACAA), which seems unlikely. Alternatively, he could persuade Apple, Alphabet, and Oracle (the cloud host for TikTok in the US) that he would not enforce PAFACAA.
Or he could declare that ByteDance had already complied with the law.
This last option, according to Alan Z. Rozenshtein at Lawfare, is the most likely, since all it requires is for ByteDance to persuade the President—not Congress, or the Department of Justice—that it has performed a “qualified divestiture.” In other words, if “ByteDance goes through the motions of reshuffling some details of its ownership stake in TikTok,” the law permits Trump to say that all is well, TikTok is no longer Chinese, and the app can continue mainlining digital crack into Americans’ brains.
One viable way of producing this outcome would be to point out what is true: 60% of this $300 billion company is already owned by non-Chinese investors. This group includes American firms like Sequoia Capital, Susquehanna Investment Group, KKR and General Atlantic.
In other words, it’s possible that nothing needs to be sold to anyone. This pre-existing American stake, could be all that Trump requires to rescue TikTok within the terms of an existing law that was designed to destroy it, leaving PAFACAA in place to blackmail future tech companies.
Following me? Now, let’s look at what else is at stake here, and for whom; and why the TikTok story has emerged as a national security story.
Let’s start with the last issue because it simple. TikTok is free to most users, and like all other social media platforms, it profits (an estimated $16.1 billion revenue in 2023) come from monetizing eyeballs and brains: users generate content and content data, TikTok collects and sells all this data to third parties, and simultaneously uses its algorithm to kick out content that generates profits and/or influence for those third parties.
What makes this a national security concern? That ByteDance, although incorporated in the Cayman Islands, was founded and is still controlled by Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo, two citizens of the People’s Republic of China. It is headquartered in Beijing and, like all corporations in the PRC, operates at the discretion of the Chinese Communist Party. To add concerns, like all other social media companies, ByteDance is invested in generative AI and virtual reality research, whose developers draw on content posted to TikTok and other apps to make fakey-fakey stories about real things, or real stories about fake things.
This has led American politicians and some opinion-makers (like digital entrepreneur Scott Galloway and his podcast pal Kara Swisher) to speculate that data collected by TikTok, and the highly addictive quality of its algorithm, could be employed by China to propagandize American audiences, spread misinformation, and throw elections.
That’s the argument—and you can color me skeptical that sophisticated minds really believe this, although Sino-phobic and otherwise ignorant members of Congress probably do. Why? Because Meta, Alphabet, and other social media companies (Truth Social, YouTube, Gab) are already doing exactly this: undermining democracy and social well-being by distributing disinformation, conspiracy theories, deepfakes, terrorist propaganda, unsolicited and often coerced porn, scams, and other malicious content. Political campaigns can buy data from any of these companies whenever they like, including through third party cut-outs, and there is no law to stop them.
My point: unregulated social media itself is a threat to national security, and Congress has done exactly nothing to restrict its reach or imagine fundamental changes to its structure and distribution that might intervene in that. And Congress refuses to regulate social media. At all.
Which leads me to my final point: existing American social media companies have a significant stake in a TikTok ban because of the vast number of American influencers (over 10 million of them) who will need to seek out other platforms for their video content. I am primarily talking about Instagram (a Meta—commonly known as Facebook—company) and YouTube (an Alphabet—commonly known as Google—company.) The larger “creator economy” is said to be worth $250 billion, and projected to double over the next two years. Now, imagine what that would look like if there were fewer players taking a cut?
Indeed, this is what at least one branding expert, Tim Clark (in a paid feature posted at Forbes), has already advised content creators large and small to do. After a TikTok ban, “creators will feel an immediate impact,” Clark wrote last summer, “especially those who cultivated their entire audience on TikTok. The creators for whom TikTok is a secondary platform, will shift back to their primary platforms like YouTube or Instagram.” So-called “native” TikTok influencers, he advised, should identify their core audience and lead them to other platforms not at risk of a ban.
If content creators are already hedging their bets, arguably, the threat of a TikTok ban, whether it is realized or not, has already advanced the financial interests of Meta and Alphabet. Perhaps is is also what has motivated these companies, their investors, and TikTok’s American stakeholders, to cozy up to the Trump administration.
Because this time next week, they will all be in Donald Trump’s tiny little hands.
What I’m reading:
I feel like the story of Andrea Munro’s abuse at the hands of Gerry Fremlin, her mother Alice Munro’s second husband, has unfolded like an onion since it first broke last fall. Each retelling of the story reveals the complexity of what families do to return their lives to normal after the unspeakable has happened, a variously felt need that often involves blaming a child for the abuser’s crimes. The New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv has written a stunning account of this open secret, which everyone should read, because we all know someone who has been gaslit by family and friends over similar crimes If Fremlin is revealed as a moral monster, egotist, and epic whiner, and Munro a deeply damaged person and enabler, there are too many collaborators to count—and occasional acts of courage and decency that shine through. (December 23, 2025)
What A.J. Brown is reading:
A keen-eyed sideline camera operator caught Eagles star wide receiver A.J. Brown (a.k.a., Swole Batman) doing—what????—while the Birds’ defense was pinning Green Bay’s collective butt to the grass at the Lincoln yesterday? Reading! Brown brings Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life, a 2020 book by Jim Murphy to every game. Brown reads a few pages to, as he puts it, “refocus and lock in despite what may transpire in the game good or bad.” This then led to the information that Brown reads at least two books every month, although he does not care for fiction. Two comments: first, anyone who reads knows that it does indeed shut out the noise and help a person re-focus; second, Brown reads two more books every month than the incoming POTUS has read in his entire adult life.
Short take:
Initially billed as a way to improve education in Cleveland’s worst-performing districts, school vouchers have become a grift that funnels up to $1 billion Ohio taxpayer dollars annually to religious schools. In at least four states, and with bills pending in three others, “private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it,” Alec MacGillis writes at ProPublica. The new Trump administration is likely to throw federal weight behind expanding a project that de-funds public education in favor of schools with no obligation to the public. “The voucher movement has been aided by a handful of billionaire advocates; it was also enabled, during the pandemic, by the backlash to extended school closures,” MacGillis explains. His reporting reveals “a strategy to start with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools, then fight to expand the benefits to far richer families—a decades-long effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate.” (January 13, 2025)
The Los Angeles fires could be the costliest natural disaster in American history, and naturally, the GOP will want to callously exploit them. Sources at Mar-A-Lago say that House Republicans have discussed tying federal aid to a looming budget reconciliation bill that will require raising the debt ceiling. This jumbo bill could, Republicans hope, pull Democratic votes in to compensate for the Freedom Caucus folks who would rather have undocumented migrants in their guest rooms than inflate the national debt further. “Many Republicans also fear adding a debt ceiling increase to their major party-line reconciliation package of border, energy and tax policy will sink the massive bill given internal GOP divisions,” Meredith Lee Hill explains at Politico, “forcing leadership back to the drawing board repeatedly to come up with other ideas.” (January 13, 2025)
And what else would some of that national debt-ballooning money be needed for? Detention of an estimated 67,000 people who would be indefinitely incarcerated by the pending Laken Riley Act, an unfunded bipartisan bill that mandates imprisoning any undocumented person accused of a nonviolent crime. And that’s only the number that ICE can identify now. According to Stephen Neukam and Stef W. Kight at Axios, “the agency told the Senate, where the bill is currently pending, that “it would need more that $3.2 billion in extra funds for the 2025 fiscal year if the bill became law, according to the document.” Senator Katie Britt, (R-AL), who introduced the legislation, is a ferocious advocate of a balanced federal budget: as Neukam and Kight report, Britt’s chief of staff, says "We're prepared to give ICE the resources it needs to properly enforce federal law and protect American families, both through the appropriations and reconciliation processes." Uh-huh. (January 12, 2025)