Episode Transcript
Morgan Sung: Let me set the scene for you. January 18th, 2025. It’s been a long day, and you plop down on the couch to relax. It’s two days till the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump, and you have no idea what chaos is on the other side of that date. The Supreme Court has just decided to uphold the law banning TikTok. But there’s no way the app will actually go down, right? So you and your phone settle in on the couch for your early evening scroll. Your whole for you page is goodbye messages from people who have found community on the app.
TikTok Voice 1: It’s just like, why would they take this app from the girls? Like if you wanted to take it, take it from the boys, not the girls, not the girls.
TikTok Voice 2: It’s just an app, but it’s our whole life now.
TikTok Voice 3: So just in case, if this is it, there’s no way I could leave without telling you guys thank you.
Morgan Sung: And as you scroll, the app starts to get a little buggy. You can’t respond to comments. Your DMs are frozen. New videos won’t load. And then you get this message.
James Charles: We were all just literally scrolling and drawing our last couple of moments on the app when we got a pop up saying, sorry, TikTok is closed. Hopefully Donald Trump will bring it back. What? Land of the free home of the brave. I don’t f***ing think so.
Morgan Sung: TikTok has finally gone down in the United States, at least. Somehow YouTuber James Charles manages to get back in and he posts an update to the rest of the world.
James Charles: I don’t know if you guys can hear me or see me or if this is even going to work. I think I may have found a loophole while the rest of America is banned. They told us the app was going to be banned at midnight. Surprise! They took it from us two and a half hours early.
Morgan Sung: But for the rest of us, chaos ensues online. People are flocking to other apps in hopes that they can rebuild their communities and more importantly, resume scrolling. There’s Red Note, the English name for Xiaohongshu, which is a Chinese social media app similar to Instagram. Some creators have already been there for days in anticipation of the ban.
TikTok Voice 4: Hi, everybody. My name is Jeffrey. I’m a TikTok refugee. I’ve been practicing my Mandarin for a year now.
Morgan Sung: The shutdown lasts for a whopping 14 hours. After all that drama, it was back up and running the next day. When users returned to the app on inauguration day, TikTok greeted them with this pop-up message.
AI Voice: Welcome back. Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U .S.
Donald Trump: And as of today, TikTok is back.
Morgan Sung: Creators have come back to the app and resumed posting as normal. And after a few weeks of not being available, it’s already back in app stores. But since the shutdown and TikTok’s new closeness with the Trump administration, many users say the vibe on the app feels different. Is it just shifting political winds or is it something more? Rumor has it that TikTok is becoming… conservative.
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
If there’s anything the internet loves, it’s a good conspiracy theory. So with TikTok, questions are swirling. Did the algorithm change? Are progressives being censored? Was the whole ban an elaborate setup to move the app to the right? New tab. Is TikTok actually more conservative now?
To get to the bottom of this, we called up internet culture expert Taylor Lorenz:, who’s been reporting on the TikTok ban saga from the very beginning. She writes about all things tech and online culture for her newsletter, User Mag, hosts the podcast Power User, and wrote an extensive history of the creator economy in her book, Extremely Online.
Hey, Taylor, how are you doing?
Taylor Lorenz: Good.
Morgan Sung: I want to start off by talking about the TikTok inauguration party. You were there. What was it like?
Taylor Lorenz: It was wild. It was crowded. It was packed with TikTok merch and these giant screens that were like looping right-wing content creators’ videos. It felt like a frat party, honestly.
Morgan Sung: I mean, just seeing pictures from it, it looked like any other influencer party. But has TikTok openly supported any US politician before?
Taylor Lorenz: No. TikTok as a company has not openly supported any politician before they sort of openly began supporting Trump over inauguration weekend.
Morgan Sung: So for those who aren’t familiar, can you briefly explain who TikTok CEO Shou Chew is?
Taylor Lorenz: Yeah. Shou Chew is a Singaporean. He is the CEO of TikTok, Inc., which of course is not based in China. TikTok is based in Singapore and the United States. Shou is based in Singapore. And he is the CEO. So he is the one that kind of runs all the day-to-day operations.
Morgan Sung: And as you wrote about in your coverage for Rolling Stone about the party, he wasn’t at the party itself, but he was at inauguration. And that seemed to throw a lot of people for a loop.
Taylor Lorenz: I wasn’t that surprised to see him at inauguration just because every single tech CEO was at inauguration. I mean, you had Tim Cook, you had Sundar Pichai, you had obviously Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. But TikTok is in the throes of this ban right now. They desperately want to not be banned and to continue to do business in the U .S. And so, of course, they’re going to do anything they can to kiss up to the government. I don’t think that this means at all that Shou is some sort of Trump supporter. We have no idea what his politics are.
Morgan Sung: Yeah, I mean, that brings me to my next question, which is about the message that users got when TikTok came back online, when TikTok was kind of explicitly thanking Trump. What are your thoughts on this?
Taylor Lorenz: I think this is opportunism. I don’t think people should mistake this for any sort of political support for Trump’s agenda. They just want to continue to operate. They want Trump to somehow find a way to overturn this ban. We know that Trump responds very well to flattery, to kind of, you know, people bowing down, look at what Elon has done, really kissing up to him in sort of a personal manner and treating him with kid gloves. And so I think that’s what that is. It is an attempt to curry favor with a president who has shown that he’s willing to help people who personally are loyal to him.
Morgan Sung: But how did people react to getting that message?
Taylor Lorenz: Well, people reacted quite negatively to getting the message, especially TikTok’s user base. You have to remember, according to Pew Research, TikTok has the most progressive news influencer ecosystem. It’s a very LGBTQ-friendly app. It’s a very diverse app. And so a lot of these people are very against Trump. And so I think they were very upset. When they saw that message, they felt like, “Oh, is TikTok now just going to be another app that caters to right-wing content creators and suppresses progressive speech?” Which is the case on, as I’ve reported, on apps like Twitter, of course, now, and Meta platforms.
Morgan Sung: And since TikTok came back online, people have made a ton of different claims about how the algorithm is changing and how it seems to be getting more conservative. What do you think? What have you seen?
Taylor Lorenz: So there’s no hard evidence that the algorithm has changed. It’s so hyper-specific and it’s so dependent on so many factors that there is no kind of universal algorithm the way people think of it. There are just thousands and thousands of inputs. I know people talk about getting a lot more Trump content on their feed or pro-Trump content on their feed. I don’t think that is necessarily due to algorithmic changes as much as it is Trump is now our president. There’s an overwhelming amount of news about him. A lot of people are hyper-engaged in those news cycles, especially if you’re trying to pay attention to whether TikTok is banned, you’re going to be paying attention to what Trump is doing.
And there’s a flood of right-wing content creators on the app. So previously, a lot of people that were banned from the app have been let back on or were, you know, deprioritizing the app because it was not a place, you know, that they considered friendly to right-wing speech. Now, of course, they consider it a place that’s friendly to right -wing speech. So I do know that the vibe has changed. I just don’t know how top-down it is.
Morgan Sung: Okay, so it seems unlikely that there’s been a wholesale change to the algorithm in a planned strategic way. But since the election and even before that, it does feel like there’s been a rightward shift across the entire internet and all the social media platforms.
I think that’s a new tab. Is all social media moving to the right?
I mean, TikTok has a sort of reputation as this bastion of leftist free speech. But a recent study actually found that during the election, TikTok was more likely to promote Republican-leaning content to Democrat-leaning users than the other way around. What do you think of this? I mean, again, is it some grand conspiracy or is it just that conservative content makes better engagement bait?
Taylor Lorenz: I mean, so much of it is just that conservatives are excellent leveraging algorithmic feeds and online attention. And you just had a lot of conservatives leveraging the internet and leveraging platforms like TikTok this election cycle to get their message out.
Morgan Sung: And like you’ve written about in your newsletter, there is no built-in support infrastructure for left-leaning content creators. Can you talk more about that?
Taylor Lorenz: So on the right, there’s an incredibly well-funded, sort of well-oiled machine. It’s an entire ecosystem of right-wing content creators from extreme far-right Nazis, basically, to sort of more mainstream trad wives, all of these people that are funded by the same sort of group of conservative billionaire donors that participate in these networks, etc. There’s absolutely nothing like that on the left. In fact, if you are on the left, you’re more likely to have your content censored. You’re more likely to have your account taken down and demonetized. It is much harder to get any sort of support. There’s no funding ecosystem. You are out there on your own and you’re being attacked by both the Democratic-centrist mainstream party and you’re also being attacked by the right. So it’s just you’re up against so many sort of barriers. And you’re not going to get any brand deals.
Morgan Sung: And you’ve written about this in an essay called The Great Creator Reset. And you’ve written about how without TikTok, there is nowhere for leftist content creators. Can you talk more about that too?
Taylor Lorenz: Yeah. So TikTok was really the last app that sort of allowed for a progressive content creator ecosystem. It allowed for progressive speech and activism the way that Twitter used to. If you think of Twitter actually back in 2015, 2016, 2017, you saw it as this hub for the Black Lives Matter movement, for the Me Too movement, etc. Now, of course, Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, who has openly stated that he’s leveraging the platform to push right wing messaging. He’s intentionally doing all of these things that they hauled Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress for in 2017. Elon Musk is sort of openly doing with Twitter now, or X rather.
If you are left-wing on that app, you are likely to be perma-banned. There are tons of activists that have been perma-banned, journalists that have been perma-banned. There is no platform that truly allows progressive speech to flourish. TikTok was that last remaining platform. And that is, to be clear, why it’s being banned. The reason TikTok is being banned, as I have reported, as Drew Harwell at the Washington Post reported, as pretty much every good reporter on this beat has made quite clear, it is not about data privacy. It is not about, quote unquote, China. It is about the speech on the app and what people were saying on the app, specifically progressive speech.
Morgan Sung: And as The Intercept pointed out in an article that was published right before TikTok went down, suppressing progressive speech includes censoring pro-Palestinian content. Republican politicians have explicitly accused TikTok of pushing anti-Israeli propaganda. Former Wisconsin representative Mike Gallagher described TikTok as, quote, digital fentanyl from China, end quote, that was allegedly turning young people against American allies. And here’s Senator Mitt Romney last year at a forum for the McCain Institute.
Mitt Romney: Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok.
Morgan Sung: In both public statements and in Supreme Court filings, TikTok said that its recommendation algorithm does not take sides and that according to polling, young people have been increasingly sympathetic to Palestinians since 2010. That’s years before TikTok even existed. Now, since October 7th, 2023, Palestinian creators have used TikTok to report on the realities of living in Gaza to an international audience.
Bisan Owda: Hi everyone this is Bisan from Gaza, I’m still alive.
Motaz Azaiza: Uh the situation is so… bad.
Medo Halimy: I’ll leave you with some footage I took right after that event…
Morgan Sung: TikTok is a key window into the experiences of those creators and the ban would effectively sever their connection with U .S. audiences.
Taylor Lorenz: That is what Rep. Gallagher was able to use to get people back on board with this ban that was completely politically dead. It wasn’t until there was this right-wing effort to associate TikTok with progressive movements, because again, it was a hub for progressive activism, and use that to push a ban, a bipartisan ban.
Morgan Sung: I mean, you just look at other social media platforms like Meta and like X or formerly Twitter, but you just compare the way that people talk about Palestine and TikTok to Meta and on X and you realize how much further right that those platforms are.
Taylor Lorenz: Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk has not hidden this. He has admitted that he is using the platform to push right-wing messaging and we know that from every single ounce of reporting. And same thing with Meta. Meta is also catering to conservatives. They have long had right-wing people in power of their policy team.
Morgan Sung: And it’s interesting because Zuckerberg has always been a billionaire and I think will always be motivated by money. But his politics seemed totally different during the first Trump term. I mean, now Meta is rolling back DEI policies and hateful conduct policies. Why capitulate to the right now?
Taylor Lorenz: Well, because it wasn’t socially acceptable to capitulate to the right during Trump’s first term, you had this whole resistance movement and Trump’s presidency was seen as this aberration. It was seen as sort of like this thing to resist against. And so tech companies were attacked for helping to put Trump in office and held to this really high standard from the public and also from people in power. Now, Trump has been completely normalized. There is no resistance and people are pretty culturally on board with Trump. Again, Trump won the popular vote this time. It was not a huge surprise that he won. And so he’s just been normalized like any other president.
Morgan Sung: If the TikTok we knew is truly dead, where does that leave its 170 million US users? What are their other options? We’ll dig into that after the break. So if you’re a creator whose main platform is TikTok, what can and should you be doing right now? Okay, new tab. Who is actually leaving TikTok? So creators are complaining, you know, as usual, complaining about shadow bans, complaining about being restricted. But do you see anyone actually leaving the app?
Taylor Lorenz: Right now, creators have not left the app. I think creators are still delusional that it’s not going to get banned. What I tell them is that they should get off as soon as possible. They should be focused on building their platforms elsewhere. But I think a lot of them feel there is no place for these progressive content creators to go.
Morgan Sung: Right. I mean, I know there’s a lot of talk about Red Note, but I mean, I’ve used Red Note for a while. And Red Note is like, yeah, exactly. Red Note just does not have the culture for discourse the way that TikTok does. It’s the app for hot, rich Chinese girls.
Taylor Lorenz: Yeah, it’s just, Red Note doesn’t function the same way as TikTok. It’s much more similar to Instagram in a lot of ways. It’s just, it doesn’t have the functionality. It doesn’t have the culture. It doesn’t have the user base. It doesn’t have the broad— I mean, so much of what made TikTok successful is that it also allowed you to interact with people around the globe. There’s such a global user base to TikTok. And that just doesn’t exist on a lot of these other platforms.
Morgan Sung: Right. I mean, we’re not finding that on Reels.
Taylor Lorenz: No, definitely not.
Morgan Sung: All I’m getting on Reels are weird raw milk ads. So I’m kind of giving up there.
Taylor Lorenz: Reels is a cursed, cursed ecosystem and nothing like TikTok.
Morgan Sung: There’s a lot of talk about whether creators can keep getting paid now that the ban is supposed to be in effect. If not for politics, do you think a change in monetization will actually drive creators away?
Taylor Lorenz: I think the inability for a lot of creators to monetize is what ultimately will also force them off the platform because there is just no way to make a living. Brands have already pulled all their money out. I mean, unfortunately, the campaign against TikTok has been so successful. It just has financially devastated the app and the ecosystem on there in ways that I think will be very difficult to recover from, even if Congress was to reverse the ban, which they’re not going to do. Right now, it’s impossible for these creators to replicate what they’re doing, which is progressive activism on other apps because other apps are so incredibly hostile to that style of content.
Morgan Sung: They also just don’t have that kind of built-in back and forth functionality that TikTok has. I’ve seen a lot of people on TikTok talk about how much of a struggle it is to move to YouTube because you’re suddenly talking to a wall instead of… Yeah, exactly. You’re not talking directly to your audience anymore.
Taylor Lorenz: Yeah. YouTube is so radically different. YouTube Shorts is nothing like TikTok at all. It’s nothing like TikTok. It is a broadcast medium. It’s very one way. There’s no discourse. There’s no interactivity. There’s no communities that form around there. It’s just a place to put clips to long-form videos. That’s so different than TikTok, which again, I think people need to understand is like a mobile video version of Twitter in terms of how you can interact, reshare, build on content and leverage mass virality.
Morgan Sung: The ban is currently in a holding pattern set to actually take effect sometime this spring, depending on whether the president delays it again. There is an alternative to a full-on ban on TikTok. That’s a new tab. TikTok forced sale. When Congress passed the law last year, they offered a choice to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance: sell TikTok to another party or we’ll ban the app. That law was just upheld by the Supreme Court in January. But so far, there aren’t a lot of serious candidates.
Lots of people are claiming to buy TikTok for clout, which you mentioned in your newsletter. Like you have Mr. Beast. You have the very controversial streaming platform Kik. And Trump floated the idea of a 50-50 partnership between ByteDance and an American company. But how would the sale of TikTok change the culture of the app?
Taylor Lorenz: TikTok is a global tech platform. Imagine if suddenly Romania was like, “Hey, Ford Motor Company, you can’t sell your cars here until you sell the entire company to us.” I mean, America is not even TikTok’s biggest market. Also, it’s just unclear how it would even happen because TikTok would be creating a local product that then competes with their global product. Basically, they would have to create a separate version of TikTok. At that point, it’s just Triller or some other app that’s not TikTok. They’ll call it TikTok, but it won’t be TikTok. They’ll take that skin and create a separate app.
Again, it’s just about censoring speech, because we have tons of Chinese social media apps. We have tons of Chinese investments. We have tons of Chinese platforms that people use on a daily basis. We have platforms like Temu and Shein that collect far more sensitive user data than TikTok and that are actually based in China, unlike TikTok, where TikTok is not based in China and user data is not stored in China. So, it’s just a farce.
Morgan Sung: There is a vibe shift on TikTok. Even if it’s not some sort of intentional grand conspiracy.
Taylor Lorenz: I totally agree, yeah.
Morgan Sung: What do you think is really behind it?
Taylor Lorenz: I mean, look, I think the ban is behind it. I think TikTok was banned. The effect that that ban has had, even though it’s been temporarily reinstated… tons of people deleted the app. You’ve also seen a flood of right-wingers leaning really hard into the app because, again, they feel like it’s pro-Trump. I think the app is in peril. It’s not the app that it was even six months ago. It’s under such a microscope that I do think that their enforcement team has stepped up a little bit against certain types of speech. I don’t know. Again, we don’t know that they’re censoring more, but I do think that it might be reasonable to assume that because they’re under a microscope, they’re taking reports of wrongdoing seriously.
And I think a lot of it is also just not even TikTok. It’s just the vibe shift in America, right? There is a cultural vibe shift that’s happened as Trump has taken his second term, right? And you’re seeing the normalization of online hate, of people saying slurs openly again. You’re seeing a lot of hatred towards immigrants, people of color, normalized. Again, there is no resistance movement the way that there was in 2017. So culturally, I think Trumpism has won right now, and that is the world that we’re living in. And yes, that is going to make all of these platforms sort of feel different.
Morgan Sung: Okay, last question. What would an internet without TikTok really look like? What would that mean for the way people interact with each other and also access information?
Taylor Lorenz: An internet without TikTok is an internet where people are a lot less informed. You have a less informed public. As I’ve written, TikTok has been an essential way that young people, especially get news and information. As Twitter has been dismantled as a news source, that entire ecosystem of access to information about wars, climate disasters, whatever, the LA fires, it’s all moved to TikTok. So TikTok is where people are getting information. It’s where people are learning about social justice issues. It’s where people are, again, doing activism. When that is shut down, you’ll have a less informed public. You’ll have a less free public. I think it’s increasingly harder for people to get their voice out and speak open and freely on the internet. TikTok gave people the ability to have a platform, reach people en masse, and do real activism. And so, yeah, we’re going to have a lot less freedoms.
Morgan Sung: So even if TikTok is back online, like Taylor mentioned, what’s it going to feel like going forward? This was a place that served as a news source, a trend accelerator, and a platform for activism and protest. Clearly, it’s no longer the same. As TikTok and other social media platforms continue to censor content, especially progressive speech, we have to wonder, will online freedom of speech become obsolete? Will there be any platform for content creators of all political leanings to have a voice? Okay, that’s a deep dive for another day. Before we spiral right now, let’s close these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our Producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Original music and sound design by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED Podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dustsilver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches. If you have any feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs at KQED.org. Follow us on Instagram at CloseAllTabsPod. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use. Thanks for listening.
