Last week, President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss his interest in a deal to transfer majority ownership of TikTok to U.S.-based corporations. Although China’s Commerce Ministry said they would work with the U.S. in resolving issues related to the app, the meeting did not lead to a final pact or provide more clarity about the future of TikTok just yet.
But Trump is keen to attract young Americans to the MAGA banner by positioning himself as the liberator of their beloved app. After he signed Executive Order 14352, “Saving TikTok While Protecting National Security,” at the end of September, he posted his own celebratory TikTok: “To all of those young people of TikTok, I saved TikTok, so you owe me big,” Trump said. What does Trump’s interest in TikTok mean for the future of the app—and for young Americans—if it comes under the sway of the White House?
After making the case that TikTok was a national-security threat, Trump did a 180 in the weeks leading up to his re-election. Although Tufts University/Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement’s analysis of exit poll data indicated that young voters favored Kamala Harris by four percentage points over Donald Trump in 2024, he falsely claimed that TikTok may have been a reason he won the youth vote and said that he had developed a “warm spot” for the platform.
Trump is keen to attract young Americans to the MAGA banner by positioning himself as the liberator of their beloved app.
At the end of his first term, Trump issued an executive order that amounted to a ban on TikTok. The Biden administration scrapped this order and replaced it with the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), which required parent company ByteDance to divest from TikTok, or face a ban on its operations in the United States. Following his inauguration, Trump repeatedly delayed enforcement of PAFACA as he worked on an agreement with China to save TikTok.
The deal has hardly penetrated the news cycle for TikTok’s most dedicated users: Nearly half of all Americans aged 18 to 29 use TikTok to keep up with politics. But the people using TikTok the most have been eerily quiet about the development of a new propaganda tool that is one of the most addicting algorithms in the current social media landscape, one that could rival Elon Musk’s X platform.
Austin Wise, president of the Pennsylvania College Democrats, told the Prospect that he hasn’t heard much discussion about the possibility of a “100 percent MAGA” TikTok even among political science students or members of university political clubs. “With deals like this, our party does a bad job at communicating how serious they really are and how detrimental these sorts of deals and corporate giveaways are,” Wise says.
The president has admitted that he would like to see TikTok become “100 percent MAGA.” His former social media manager even suggested that Barron Trump should serve on the TikTok board, while Trump’s centibillionaire friend Larry Ellison owns Oracle, the main company involved in the algorithm transfer. Ellison’s media empire is rapidly expanding—with Trump’s approval.
The Ellison family merged Skydance Media with Paramount in August and are trying their best to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery as well. Ellison also served on the board of directors for Tesla and gave Musk $1 billion to help him buy Twitter in 2022, a purchase which Musk then used to churn out pro-Trump content before the 2024 election.
Unlike the nationwide outrage and subsequent relief after TikTok briefly went offline in January, the news of a possible “TrumpTok” in the coming months has largely flown under the radar of the half of college students who use TikTok. The vast majority of Generation Z users say they receive political commentary on TikTok’s “For You” page, and young Americans are more likely than any others to see and engage with political posts on the page. Sinan Aral, an MIT professor of information technology and marketing, has found that of all misinformation online, false political news spreads the fastest and the furthest.
What’s become clear is how a platform’s management decisions impact the kinds of content available to audiences: “Filtering algorithms, relevance algorithms, and then, even more specifically, algorithms that either blacklist or whitelist certain types of content or perspectives can have a big effect on what people see,” Aral says.
Some of the most influential social media platforms have changed their content moderation policies dramatically. One of Musk’s first moves after buying Twitter was laying off the teams dedicated to monitoring and eliminating hate speech and dis/misinformation on the platform. Within a year, Mark Zuckerberg made the same decision for Meta. These algorithm training and moderation shifts are a leading factor in the spread of harmful data and ideas.
For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the first fully 21st-century generation, a supersized propaganda machine is a threat to robust civic discourse, especially following Elon Musk’s overhaul of Twitter’s content recommendation policies and Instagram’s new policy that will push political content to users’ feeds even if they do not seek it out or follow the accounts posting the content.
Wise says that since Musk left the administration in May after his controversial DOGE tenure, he’s been attacking Trump on X and allowing more anti-Trump rhetoric. However, should TikTok become a right-wing alternative, it would become a potent alternative to X: “If Barron Trump is on the board of TikTok, [the app is] going to push down anything anti-government, anything anti-Trump, anything remotely anti-Israeli government, and that’s my fear,” he says.
Given how wildly addicting ByteDance’s algorithm that powers the “For You” pages that steer content to users remains, it’s hard to be confident people will leave the app even if they do wake up to the implications of the deal or start to see more right-wing content as they scroll. For every user who sees political content, there are people who say they see funny posts about other current events. And although some young people use TikTok as a source of news and information, many more college students also rely on TikTok for entertainment. Essentially, almost everyone on the app (especially young people) is both being fed political commentary and watching funny videos, which makes it even harder to stop scrolling: Even if a user finds the political commentary annoying or disagreeable, that person can find entertainment as well as something that should be even more concerning: political content designed to be entertaining.
It isn’t surprising that users wouldn’t want to give up TikTok. Unsolicited political content is no longer shocking for young people, especially college students—it’s practically ubiquitous in their online spaces. The problem is that suspect data and outright lies also can pollute their feeds.
Most members of Congress have not sounded the alarm about the possible risks from a domestically owned TikTok in the current highly partisan political climate. But at the same time, news that a social media platform might develop a right-wing slant isn’t exactly an earth-shattering occurrence for a generation that migrated to the internet not long before the 2016 election. But if a new team at TikTok can keep their users scrolling between ICE job recruitment videos and shadow bans, the threat that a rebranded TikTok could pose to impressionable young people is potentially a very real one.