SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
tiktok ban
As Trump Signs TikTok Order, Critics Sound Alarm Over Corruption and US Propaganda
One watchdog leader noted that the president's deal involves "one of his major crypto business partners that generates tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trump family."
Sep 25, 2025
President Donald Trump on Thursday issued an executive order claiming to "save" TikTok from a federal law that would ban the video-sharing platform in the United States, but critics are condemning the Republican's deal as yet another case of him "picking winners and losers in government policy based on who is enriching his family."
Trump initially kicked off efforts to force TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest with an August 2020 executive order, but Democratic former President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan legislation that would ban the platform based on national security concerns last year.
Since returning to office, Trump has pledged to "save" TikTok, delaying enforcement of the law and negotiating a deal under which, according to a White House fact sheet, the US application "will be majority-owned by US investors, operated in the US by a board of directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials, and subject to strict rules to protect Americans' data and our national security."
The fact sheet also confirms that "ByteDance will hold less than 20% of the stock as required by law," and "Oracle—one of the nation's leading technology companies—will act as TikTok’s security provider and independently monitor and assure the safety of all operations in the US."
Critics have expressed alarm about both the anticipated quality of the US platform and the reported investors.
OpenSecrets noted Thursday that Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison is "a Trump supporter and major bankroller of Republican candidates and causes," and the company "has spent at least $11 million on federal-level government lobbying during each of the past four full years," a trend that is set to continue this year.
Citing unnamed sources, CNBC reported Thursday that, in addition to Oracle, the main investors will be Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX. Previous reporting has also suggested involvement from venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
Trump on the TikTok deal: "Rupert Murdoch is involved."
[image or embed]
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 25, 2025 at 4:35 PM
While some opponents of the Trump plan have highlighted his ties to Ellison, Andreessen, and Horowitz, Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US, focused on his relationship with MGX in a Thursday statement.
"President Trump's use of his office to enrich himself and his friends seems to know no bounds," Carrk said. "His grand scheme to 'save' TikTok just so happens to involve the enrichment of one of his major crypto business partners that generates tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trump family."
"That's no coincidence for the only US president in history that has seen his bottom line grow by billions from the White House," he asserted. "Meanwhile, working Americans see their costs continue to increase, from groceries to healthcare to housing. It's clear the president's priority is himself, not the rest of us."
Trump's Thursday order affirms that the deal complies with last year's law and allows another 120 days to finalize the details.
The Associated Press reported that "Trump said Thursday that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has agreed to move forward with it. However, the Chinese embassy in Washington didn't immediately respond to an AP inquiry seeking confirmation that China has formally signed off on the proposed framework deal."
US political leaders have long claimed that under ByteDance's control, users may encounter content favored by the Chinese government. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said earlier this week that "if the concern had been that TikTok could be a conduit for Chinese government propaganda—a concern the Supreme Court declined to even consider—people can now be concerned that TikTok could be a conduit for US government propaganda."
Joining Trump in the Oval Office for the executive order signing on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance seemed to confirm that's the plan, telling reporters that "the US company will have control over how the algorithm pushes content to users, and that was a very important part of it."
Responding to Vance's remarks, one social media user quipped, "Ahh, so it was just an issue of *whose* propaganda."
Keep ReadingShow Less
America's Darkest Comeback Tour: From Racehorse Theory to Resistance
Throughout American history, in moments of darkness (and there have been plenty), people have found ways to forge solidarity across difference.
Jan 23, 2025
As we enter U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, a chilling convergence of digital theater and eugenic ideology is unfolding before our eyes. Two days before the inauguration, millions watched their TikTok accounts flash warnings across their screens—only to see them restored hours later with Trump positioned as their digital savior.
This orchestrated crisis wasn't just political theater; it was a test run for what was to come. Millions of Americans, including young people whose identities have been shaped by endless scrolling, saw their dopamine withdrawal weaponized into a demonstration of power, foreshadowing a presidency that would soon explicitly embrace the pseudo-scientific theories that once fueled the darkest chapters of American history.
The choreography continued at Trump's pre-inauguration rally on Sunday, January 19, where the aesthetic was deliberately carnage-red: red banners, red caps, red lights casting a deep red glow over the crowd speckled with cowboy hats. Against this blood-tinged backdrop, Trump spliced scenes from Full Metal Jacket with TikTok clips of drag queens, weaponizing confusing and false contrasts to signal his vision of "restored masculinity." Ever the entertainer, Trump showed scenes from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket to represent a past that never existed, feeding his audience a hollow nostalgia for an America that never was. Kubrick had made that film for the exact opposite reason that Trump chose to flash the scenes across the screens. Full Metal Jacket makes graphically visible the brainwashing of young men by hyper-masculine expectations of war.
The tension between America's ideals and its realities has always been the space where change happens, where communities have pushed against boundaries and reimagined what's possible.
But it was his moment with Elon Musk and Musk's young son that revealed something more chilling. When Trump praised the child's inherited intelligence, invoking "racehorse theory," he wasn't just expressing admiration for the person who is arguably the greatest influence on the sequel of his presidency—he was broadcasting a eugenic worldview that has haunted American history since the 1920s. This was not the first time that Trump has evoked this pseudo-scientific theory at the root of the Holocaust. For a nation built by immigrants and by enslaved persons, his rhetoric about "cleansing" the country of what he terms "criminal illegals" from countries like Congo and Venezuela represents an existential threat to the very diversity that has always been America's greatest strength.
We've seen this before in American history. When eugenic ideologies took hold in the early 20th century, they found fertile ground in institutions across the country, from elite universities to state legislatures. Today, as Trump explicitly returns to this language, we're watching history's shadow lengthen across our democracy. The same pseudo-scientific racism that once justified sterilization programs and immigration quotas now powers algorithms and influences policy. With Elon Musk standing next to him, Trump promoted eugenics hours before he would become president again. Then, during the inauguration on January 20, while Trump was at a distinguished luncheon surrounded by tech oligarchs, Elon Musk stood before Trump's most fervent fans and raised his hand in a salute that cannot be compared to anything but a Nazi salute.
It is harrowing to stand on the precipice of this slide toward authoritarianism and white supremacist dehumanization. Yet throughout American history, in moments of darkness (and there have been plenty), people have found ways to forge solidarity across difference, to build connections in spite of–and sometimes because of—the forces trying to divide them. As social media platforms owned by oligarchs become instruments of division, our resistance must be rooted in physical spaces of community. When we look at our neighbors—in urban centers, rural towns, and suburban streets—and say, "I see you, I hear you, I stand with you," we're preserving the human connections that authoritarianism fears most.
The path forward lies not in Trump's dystopian vision of genetic superiority, but in the mutual aid networks sprouting up across the country. These grassroots communities of care and solidarity represent the most radical spaces of resistance available to us as we face the challenges ahead. They embody not some mythical American spirit, but the real and difficult work of building connection across difference—work that has always happened in the shadows of our nation's darker impulses.
In this moment of crisis, while Trump orchestrates the terrifying sequel of his reality-TV presidency—manufacturing crises, staging spectacles, and exhausting our capacity for outrage—we must remember that democracy has never been a destination but is a messy, imperfect journey. Behind each choreographed distraction, real policies of dehumanization take shape. Yet even as the entertainer-in-chief commands center stage, communities continue their quiet work of resistance and mutual support. The tension between America's ideals and its realities has always been the space where change happens, where communities have pushed against boundaries and reimagined what's possible. Our task now is to continue this long journey toward justice, not by following every performance, but by strengthening the bonds between us. We must build these connections before they can be severed by the politics of division and spectacle. Let's find each other. Let's hold on to each other, let's hold on for our lives, and each other's lives.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The TikTok Ban Is Discriminatory and Unlawful. Here’s Why.
What Congress is telling the world is that being a person or company that simply has origins in Asia is enough to be labeled a national security threat—no evidence required. That is racial profiling and an affront to the Constitution.
Jan 17, 2025
Today, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s wrongheaded decision to ban TikTok in a unanimous decision. The ban on TikTok is set to take effect on Sunday January 19, 2025.
Ahead of this misguided ruling, 15 racial justice nonprofits submitted an emergency filing to the Supreme Court, explaining how the TikTok ban violates the rights of 170 million U.S. users and echoes a disgraceful history of anti-Asian racism.
It is no secret that our government wrongfully uses “national security” as a weapon against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Stop AAPI Hate’s research highlights how the government routinely scapegoats our communities for economic downturns, public health crises, and national security threats—often without any evidence.
When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same.
In the case of TikTok, the government claims that a ban is necessary to protect U.S. national security against China. However, the government also filed an affidavit in open court, signed by a senior U.S. national security official, stating there is “no information” that China had ever tried to use TikTok for nefarious purposes in the United States.
In other words, what Congress is telling the world is that being a person or company that simply has origins in Asia is enough to be labeled a national security threat—no evidence required.
That is racial profiling, plain and simple. And it is an affront to the Constitution.
It is disappointing, though unsurprising, that our government is targeting Asian American communities solely because of our race and national origins. Since our nation’s founding, our government has repeatedly trampled on the rights of Asians, Asian Americans, and other minority groups by relying on so-called “national security” concerns as a basis for outright racial discrimination.
Take, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese American incarceration during World War II, and government-sanctioned racial profiling and surveillance of innocent Muslim communities following the 9/11 attacks. More recently, we saw the China Initiative, a Department of Justice operation from 2018 to 2022 that unjustly targeted Chinese and Chinese American academics, ruined careers and livelihoods, and chilled scientific research.
Every time the government insisted that such laws or programs targeting Asian Americans were necessary, it reinforced the pernicious “perpetual foreigner” stereotype or the idea that all Asian people in America are inherently suspicious and disloyal to the United States based on our ancestry, skin color, or religious faith.
Those laws and programs were based on fearmongering and scapegoating. All three branches of government—the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court—eventually admitted that Japanese American incarceration violated the Constitution. Both the House and the Senate officially apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws. And the DOJ eventually shut down the China Initiative, acknowledging it perpetuated a discriminatory double standard against people with any ties to China, though President-elect Donald Trump wants to revive it.
Our government never seems to learn and instead continues to pass laws motivated by anti-Asian prejudice, like this TikTok ban.
The TikTok ban has real human costs. The ban will silence 170 million U.S. users, including communities like ours that rely on TikTok to build solidarity, share valuable information, practice their faith, and engage in free expression.
But what worries us even more is how the TikTok ban fuels hateful rhetoric and actions against Asian Americans. It is clear that Congress targeted TikTok because the company is Chinese. Other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube collect vast amounts of user data and have had major privacy and security issues—yet the government is not applying the same level of scrutiny on those companies.
When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same. We saw this exact ripple effect of hate during the Covid-19 pandemic.
At the start of the pandemic, then-President Trump spewed racist, anti-Asian rhetoric blaming Chinese people for the virus, fueling a torrent of hate against AAPI communities. In fact, from 2020 to 2022, Stop AAPI Hate received over 2,000 reports of hate acts in which offenders mimicked Trump’s language. His rhetoric emboldened people to spit racist vitriol at our community members as we shopped for groceries, dropped our kids off at school, and took the bus to work. They shouted that we were diseased and told us to go back to our country. Since our founding in March 2020, we have received over 12,000 reports of anti-AAPI hate acts from across the country—and we know racism and discrimination increase when politicians target our communities.
That’s why AAPI communities must tell our leaders that we disagree with the TikTok ban. This decision is not only an affront to our civil liberties and free speech, it is also an affront to our safety. We need leaders who will defend our rights and safety—not strip it away.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular