Is this the real reason Trump flip-flopped on TikTok?

20 January

Although President-elect Donald Trump was vehemently critical of TikTok in the past, he vowed to defend the platform — which is facing a ban in the United States — after returning to the White House on Monday, January 20.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in a scathing article published on Inauguration Day 2025, argues that Trump's flip-flop on TikTok was inspired by his need for "disinformation."

"Not too long ago," Marcotte recalls, "Donald Trump was a big fan of banning TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app that went offline in the U.S. early Sunday under a controversial ban. On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the law, passed by bipartisan majorities last April, largely due to concerns that the Chinese government used the platform to spy on Americans. President Joe Biden signed that law, but only four years after Trump, while still president, tried and failed to ban the app through executive order."

Marcotte warns that there is "good reason to believe Trump's personal reasons" for going from TikTok opponent to TikTok defender "weren't so noble."

"Trump…. has changed his tune about TikTok, but not because he disbelieves the intelligence reports or because he is a free trade absolutist," Marcotte emphasizes. "Hardly that, as his love of tariffs demonstrates. No, it's because he's learned, in the past four years, that TikTok is a shockingly efficient disseminator of disinformation, which is Trump's main stock-in-trade."

TikTok, according to Marcotte, "is good for Trump" because it "is a maelstrom of disinformation so gargantuan that even Elon Musk-controlled Twitter fails to compete."

"It's a train wreck of BS, from people claiming sunscreen and vaccines don't work to bizarre videos claiming demons infect everything to old-fashioned authoritarian lies," the Salon journalist observes. "The company claims to stand for 'free speech,' but the Chinese government censors information that doesn't serve its political goals. The algorithm is hidden from public view, but it's easy to see it favors divisive, emotionally manipulative and misleading information."

Marcotte continues, "It ratchets up culture war tensions and stokes arguments while undermining people's mental ability to focus on developing solutions. Hundreds of millions of people willingly plug into an app that feeds them the demoralizing propaganda authoritarians have been trying to shove down our throats forever. It's a fascist's dream."

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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