TikTok’s time in the U.S. was brief. “The tide is moving out on TikTok,” he expressed to me at that moment.
This seems somewhat ironic in retrospect, because not only is President Trump — the individual who appointed Carr to head the FCC — rushing to rescue the app from a U.S. ban, but the Trump administration has now just launched its own TikTok account, boasting 153,000 followers as of now, exactly five years to the month after Trump, during his initial term, enacted an executive order prohibiting the app on national security grounds.
I guess the lesson here is, spend enough time in politics and you will eventually… conflict with yourself? In all seriousness, don’t waste your efforts searching for a coherent intellectual thread in the TikTok ban narrative of the last few years. Below is a brief summary of how we arrived at this stage.
