David Karpf writes:

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.)

Five years ago, Trump signed an executive order warning Americans about the potential for TikTok to be used as a dangerous surveillance tool. He wrote then that the app’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information—potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.” This warning is warranted, to a degree. President Xi Jinping would probably have a hard time engineering the downfall of America through the media served on TikTok, where it’s always been more likely that you’ll encounter waves of brain rot rather than anything that seems like genuine mind control, but the potential for digital surveillance through social media is very real. [Continue reading…]