MAGA’s next wave of influencers saved TikTok

The decease knell for American TikTok should person been connected March 13th, 2024, erstwhile Congress voted connected an overwhelmingly bipartisan ground to unit its genitor institution to merchantability the app oregon look an outright ban. Rarely bash you ever spot Republicans and Democrats successful statement implicit anything, but some sides saw the app arsenic a nationalist information menace and disquieted that the Chinese authorities would usage it to sow misinformation and secretly harvest its users' idiosyncratic data. After the measure was signed into instrumentality by President Joe Biden and negotiations with ByteDance dragged on, a prohibition seemed inevitable, adjacent if his adversary Donald Trump won.

After all, MAGA had ever been accordant astir hating 2 things that hap to proliferate connected TikTok: the Chinese Communist Party, whom they believed were secretly bankrolling the Bidens; and people who openly enactment Palestine. And successful 2020, Trump signed an enforcement bid attempting to prohibition TikTok, partially aft seeing how TikTok was boosting enactment for his then-rival Joe Biden.

But months aft the instrumentality officially kicked in, Trump sits successful the Oval Office, TikTok remains online nether Chinese ownership, and its destiny hinges connected whether the US and China tin travel to an …

Read the afloat communicative astatine The Verge.