How Meta's MAGA heel turn is a play for global power
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It's been a messy couple weeks for big tech companies as the second Trump administration kicks off an unprecedented era of how we think about who controls the internet.

Meta has changed its rules to openly allow more slurs and hate speech on its platforms. TikTok was banned and sort of unbanned. And a bunch of tech CEOs attended the second Trump inauguration, openly kissing the ring of a president who commands an enormous amount of attention across their platforms. There's a major collision or maybe merger happening right now between billionaire power and state power. And everyone who uses tech to communicate, which is basically everyone, is stuck in the middle.

Oh my god, Eli, there you go acting like the world makes sense again. Like, what the hell? No, of course this makes no sense. That's Kate Klodik, a lawyer as well as an associate professor at St. John's University Law School, trying to help me work through all the different ways the Trump administration is handling companies like Meta and TikTok, and the very concept of free speech online. As you can tell, there are a lot of inconsistencies.

But the one thing that ties this whole mess together is just how big these companies are, and how they've drafted the Trump administration into some big geopolitical battles. Kate just returned to the United States for more than a year in Europe, studying how those countries are thinking about the internet. And she's got a lot of thoughts about these geopolitical conflicts, and how they're shaping the present and future of online speech and the internet itself.

This isn't just some academic exercise. These fights have a real impact on how regular people experience these platforms. Just a few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg made that big announcement about changing content moderation on meta platforms. He's getting rid of fact-checking in favor of crowdsourced community notes and changing the terms of service to allow a whole lot of bigoted and transphobic content that used to be at least nominally against the rules.

You can read this as a MAGA heel turn from Zuck, and certainly his new haircut suggests a man approaching middle age grasping to reclaim the confidence of youth. But these moves are also international in scope. The EU's Digital Services Act imposes some potentially very heavy and expensive regulations on social media platforms.

And if Donald Trump likes Mark Zuckerberg and likes Facebook enough, maybe he'll go fight Europe on Meta's behalf. And we don't need to just guess at this. This is very much what Zuckerberg himself is saying he wants out of Trump. Pretty bluntly, Mark Zuckerberg is trading transphobia for a new kind of trade war.

This kind of wheeling and dealing is going to define how tech companies handle Trump 2.0. Here at The Verge, we've been calling it gangster tech regulation, and there's a lot to unpack. There's also, bluntly, the Trumpiness of it all, a theory of power that's entirely focused on outcomes with no regard for the legitimacy or the fairness of the process that arrives at those outcomes. This worldview creates huge opportunities for open corruption and, well, dictatorship.

That's what we've seen this week with the TikTok ban, which is another victim of the geopolitical war for control of speech on the internet. Congress passed a law that banned TikTok unless the app was divested of Chinese control, but Trump simply decided to ignore that law for political gain. Even though ignoring the law carries such huge penalties that Apple and Google aren't taking the risk of having TikTok back in their stores.

Now Trump is saying he will in fact force a sale and that he wants the US government to own 50% of TikTok. An idea so problematic that Kate and I found it hard to even list all of the First Amendment issues it would create. Like you heard Kate say, a lot of this doesn't make much sense. But we're going to try anyway. Here we go.

Kate Klonick, you're an associate professor at St. John's Law School. Welcome back to Decoder. Thanks for having me. There's a lot to talk about in the world of online speech. You have a thesis I really want to explore, which is that all of these arguments over content and content moderation are really part of a much larger geopolitical discussion about whether countries are allowed to regulate tech platforms at all.

The Trump administration has just come sailing into the struggle here. The platform owners are all kissing up to the administration. Trump started positioning himself as the great savior of TikTok even before the inauguration, before he was president, when he didn't have any power. And inside all of that is the user experience of just being on the internet and knowing what you are or aren't allowed to say or do on these platforms. The way we encounter misinformation or fact-checking, the way the communities themselves police that,

The basic reality of who is allowed to bully whom, it all seems up in the air. So let's set the stage. What's the sense you're getting of the current moment on the internet? Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu in another life. Before he became the Tim Wu that was like Curse of Bigness, published a book with Jack Goldsmith called Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. And this came out in 2006. And in this, they basically said that this would happen, that the internet is a vector for power and controlling information ecosystems. And...

Like any other vacuum, the state will try to control it and it will become a new force for foreign policy and diplomacy and geopolitics. And I feel like that is, you know, very much what's happening. Can I start with just a very simple thing that I hear from our audience, I hear all over the Internet all the time that to me is now conclusively wrong, which is that politicians don't understand the Internet.

Right. Like lawmakers don't understand the Internet. They can't be trusted to regulate the Internet. We should just leave it alone. And it feels like in this moment, what you have is a bunch of governments around the world saying, oh, we understand this. We want to make some rules about this or all the way at the end of the line. We want to totally control this because we understand that what people see is a large portion of what they believe. And that has political consequences for us. And that understanding is about as sophisticated as I think it's ever been.

People are experiencing it as Mark Zuckerberg caving to Donald Trump. Like there's something weird there where it feels like intuitively we say, well, these old people don't know anything about the internet. And actually they know everything they need to know about it, which is they need to control it.

I just recently moved back to the U.S. after 15 months in Europe. I was living in Paris and studying the European law, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act and how it kind of was being enacted and meeting with regulators and people in Brussels and lobbyists and seeing how all of this was playing out. I was like up to my elbows in this and it was like invisible. No one cared about it in the U.S. And I just had to sit there and kind of be like, this will be a big deal soon.

One of the conversations I had with some of like the heads of some tech companies that I met with in Europe was that they had had multiple meetings with people in Brussels, like the politicians, and basically were just like, we don't need to understand anything about your product or what you do to regulate you.

We don't need to understand a single thing. We just need to understand that we need to regulate you and this will get us money, power, access to this information economy. Do they understand how clouds work? No. Do they understand how cookies work? No, they certainly do not. And then at the same time, have they finally understood the greater power of how this fits into a machine and how it can truly be used to their advantage? Yes, I think finally they have. I think

For a long time, they were actually small potatoes in it. You saw Josh Hawley, you saw like Amy Klobuchar, you saw like all of these people use beating up tech companies and the threat of regulating tech companies for like fundraising and vote getting and they clip their speeches and like do whatever.

And now they're seeing the much bigger picture of like kind of what it means in this huge global sense. So like you're right in both counts, I guess is what I'm saying. They do not understand it. They still don't. Yet they do. They know exactly what they need to know about how the Internet works and how this all works. It is a really new massive transnational power that they have the opportunity of being politically in control of a very large market, a lot of power over.

Are the governments more powerful than Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and whoever else? Because that, to me, feels like the question of our time. Whether or not the United States government is more powerful than all the tech companies, yes, they have some sort of regulatory relationship. Yes, the tech companies might have to waste time in court getting to whatever outcomes they want. But there's a real sense of, actually, you can't tell us what to do.

Right. Like you simply will not. And if you do, if you try, we'll just fund your challenger until you go away. And that feels like a real tension that we're just going to directly experience for the next however long.

I think this is kind of a game of chicken that has only gotten higher and higher stakes in the last few years. When Google was fighting right to be forgotten, for people not familiar with right to be forgotten, this was like a privacy directive in the EU that wanted Google to delist from search results certain types of things when it was outmoded or when people requested it. And like Google didn't want to do it because it was a U.S. company and they thought that this was censorship and like all this other stuff. And so they fought it in courts. And...

At one point, like, you know, I was like, well, if Google just pulled out over this, like pulled it, stopped operating in Europe and took search away from Europeans, like wouldn't like they just cave. And I remember like there is just no way that there was going they were going to put themselves in the chopping block for for something like that. You have to kind of think of this all the time about, I mean, honestly, what the end of the day consequences of the law are. It's easy to say like, oh, well, we can just play this out in court and then the court will issue something and this can be long things.

Everyone needs Google. How would like the company, how would the country survive? And I think that that's true. But then at the same time, like who has the guns and the actual police power? I know it sounds like a really like weird place to go to, but they can like I mean, they arrested Paval Durov. They can arrest CEOs. They can seize servers. They can seize office space. They can like they can take assets.

Those are real things that you can do. On the other hand, if you have like four of the largest companies, Meta, Google, Microsoft, like Oracle, AWS, Amazon, decide to suddenly not comply with the DSA directive, the entire European economy would shut down. Like if they didn't have access, like that's a huge decision. Maybe it does come down to seizing office space and arresting CEOs.

Those kinds of ends of days types of scenarios are not 100% off the table. I mean, I think there's a lot of negotiating runway before we get there. There are lots of decisions and conversations happening as you're watching who's being invited onto the dais at the inauguration with Trump about who's going to be in power and who's good to ally with. The way I've been thinking about it is that these companies and their CEOs have for a long time acted like nation states.

Right. Meta is just a nation state. It's just a huge company that operates around the world. It's global. Mark Zuckerberg has sometimes talked like a statesman. Lately, he's talking like a UFC fighter. But sometimes he's talked like a statesman. Tim Cook certainly talks like a statesman. There's a real argument you could make that the presence of Apple in China and its reliance on TSMC is a stabilizing force in that region, all just unto itself. This group of CEOs –

They play the role of statesman just as much as anybody and now they're doing what feels like bizarrely mercantilist trade policy but they're not the actual government. So they need the government to implement their policy and it's very confusing who has the power. It's just weird to think of like the geopolitical future of

with like a wedding seating chart for version of politics. And that yet seems to be what's happening. This idea of like becoming like a nation state, going into these markets and to these places and bringing some type of policy that was like a global set of norms and speech rules and things like that to areas and employing all the people and doing all of this stuff. If it was like actually like the Dutch East India Company or the British East India Company in some way.

But I will say, again, not to be kind of the nitpicky about definitions here, but the reason that I didn't end up kind of going with that analogy is like those were also they also sent soldiers. And I really do think that this is like I am all for heightening the drama and understanding the dramatic kind of like.

escalation of what's going on here. But right now, there is only one node of this kind of equation that has actual police power and arms, and that is the state, the actual states. And that

maybe makes a difference in terms of like how they decide to enact like court decisions and what the, how the game of chicken ends. So all of this is diplomacy until all of a sudden it's not, and your offices are seized and you're arrested. And only one side can pull that trigger. It's a very big trigger to pull, but you can act like a statesman all you want. You're not a statesman. And I don't think this will happen, unfortunately, but like we've spent all of this time talking about antitrust over the last few years, which

Honestly, I never have. I gave it a really deep dive and then kind of came to the conclusion this was not the answer for a million different reasons. But one of them is that it did not stop these individuals from being hyper rich and hyper controlling and creating these oligarchies. That only is resolved with taxes. And so like if you really kind of want to get at the things that are like maybe the biggest threats to democracy right now.

It's not really like a control over our data type of thing. It is actually like control over our political system by a group of pay-to-play billionaires. And the only solution to that is to act within that. I don't know. That is like a much more actually depressing realization to come to in which you cannot solve it with agency power or like one good like FTC chair or something like that. It is a much larger problem with like our broken political system.

So those are the stakes. We have not taxed billionaires out of their power, and now they have economic leverage over governments. But the governments, if they choose to use it, still have all of the traditional power of the state. We need to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll look at how those billionaires are handling that. Support for Decoder comes from Grammarly. We know that AI tools are becoming more common in our everyday lives, and businesses too. But the issue is, how do you use these tools in a way that's beneficial?

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Welcome back. I'm talking with St. John's Law School professor Kate Klonick about the pretty major shifts we're seeing in how internet platforms relate to content and to power. One of the biggest shifts recently is all the changes Mark Zuckerberg announced at Meta that are in content moderation and fact-checking earlier this month.

You are seeing, at least in the case of Zuckerberg, what feels like a capitulation to power. He is on the Joe Rogan show talking about how he needs more masculine energy in his company. He's shutting off fact-checking after basically a Republican pressure campaign from Jim Jordan in the House and many others. Brendan Carr said he was going to revoke 230 unless these companies stopped fact-checking. That is just a censorious position from the incoming FCC chair.

Trump famously said he was going to put Zuck in jail. You have this 180 shift from Mark Zuckerberg saying, I'm just going to do what you want. And he's been pretty clear about what he wants in return, right? He wants the government to continue whatever Apple antitrust case so he can make his glasses sync with iPhones better. And he certainly wants the government to go up against the EU and fight against the DSA and the other EU regulations. Inside of that is the user experience of meta platforms, right? How do you think that's going to play out?

In the early 10s, I guess, 2010s, teens, I don't even know what you'd call that decade, Zuckerberg did believe internally that this would be a way to do content moderation. Of course, he did not originate that. It was happening on Reddit. It was happening on Wikipedia. It was happening in lots of small forums that were self-modulated or granted mods certain types of power.

The idea of what the academics, Sarah Roberts, calls commercial content moderation came about because so much speech was being generated at such a high rate and getting placed next to very lucrative ad content that you could not afford, essentially, at some of these companies to leave it up to the users to police their own space, right? Yeah.

To kind of your point of are we moving towards community notes, what does this kind of mean? And like, what does this mean for content moderation? I mean, there's like a few things. I think that Wikipedia and Reddit are very different models of platforms.

platform and have different speech affordances to their platform, both in terms of like the medium, it's primarily text-based and in terms of like the organization and use of their site, which is like through essentially like sub threads, sub threads. And like, lastly, the people who do a lot of the, they have,

Spent a lot of labor and time enforcing and creating like communities that actually link meaningful reputational heft to what you do on the site, even if you're operating from an anonymous handle. And so you can gain more power by being a good moderator and lose a lot of power by being a bad moderator and these types of things of recreating kind of social norms.

norms affordances that we would have in real life around anonymous identities are like choices that they made and also work on those sites because of, as I said, the way that they run. So like, I'll just start there that those are kind of, you're right. Those are the community notes that existed for a long time in various ways, but they have survived and been

and they have their limits on places like Reddit and Wikipedia, specifically because there was early investment in them and the sites are fundamentally different in kind than something like the walled garden of meta. It also feels like Wikipedia and Reddit, to your point...

The companies that run them or the foundations that run them are aware of the social dynamics of moderators versus not moderators and who has power and who doesn't. And on Reddit, there's subreddit wars and Reddit's fracture all the time. And the companies know this. Like –

They're aware that this dynamic is what governs the users of the platform and they – to whatever extent they build tools, they build the tools around those dynamics. This is all new for Meta at billion-person scale and I don't know that Meta is ready for it.

Most people do not use Facebook in its public posting capacity. You follow and know people that you know in real life that build in certain types of like social structures and social norm enforcement. That's kind of important, except for, I will say, groups.

And groups on Facebook are this weird pockets of kind of a subreddit-like or a Wikipedia-like environment in which you are finding people grouping themselves by interest or need or geographical location or things that they have in common in other ways that are not that they know each other in real life. And those groups

have long been very difficult to moderate and have relied on like rules set out by moderators in a subreddit like fashion. And a lot of that happens on those groups to do it like that. So there's a difference between what you see in your feed and how that is getting moderated in that particular way versus what you're seeing in groups. And then there's other types of like all of the other products that's been off of Facebook blue, like Instagram in particular is

is different from both of those. I think that there's something to kind of be said for it. Not only do they not have these

tool necessarily, or they've built them in some places, but not in others. It's not clear like how these will be deployed across all of their products. And it wasn't clear how they were not being deployed before, right? Like there was, there wasn't fact checking happening in group posts. Like that wasn't a thing. So yeah, I think that there's a lot that's kind of duplicitous about this announcement and that is like one small part of it.

I'm struggling to reconcile the idea of like, we're not going to allow fact checking with we will allow some kinds of bigotry. Like, there's something in there that is a collapse or a conflation that seems directly related to the political moment. Have you sorted this out? I mean, I have I know I have not. I have not myself solved this particular world problem, but I do.

Well, that's what Decoder is for. Yeah, I know. Sorry. I should have done a little bit more studying before I came on. No, I mean, I mean, I think that that's the sliding scale and that's the nature of kind of this problem. And I think that what people don't realize is that all of these speech policies always exist.

political. There was not a targeting of like of the American right. It was really that there had been kind of these nets put up of what was permissive normative speech that was for a long time totally fine. And then kind of the dialogue of the right moved into the nets. They began to say things that were like,

standard deviations kind of off of what the norms had been. And now, you know, Zuckerberg is announcing that he is moving the nets. And so like this is a choice, but it's also just like an inconsistent choice. Post 2016, all these companies really cared about doing good governance and trying to do the right thing and fix election integrity and all of these other problems and invest in good governance of speech on their sites and transparency in their policies.

And it had its problems, to be sure, but it was a huge amount of money and time that they invested in these things. And now we're seeing an era in which that is going away. And in part, I think it is because there was never going to be enough to satisfy people that the tech companies were good and they saw no payoff for investing all this money in these types of things.

But also because I just think that there was more knowledge that started to kind of happen around how these processes work. And I've kind of revamped this idea that if you were going to measure that era of content moderation as what we were getting,

In that golden era, I think that the thing that you would say that we were getting was procedural consistency. That was the goal. It was not like take down all of the right or keep up all of the left ideas. It was about having rules and applying them fairly, no matter whether you're Donald Trump or Joe Rogan or Nancy Pelosi, that there would be rules that we would create and that we would apply them when you said certain things and that we would apply them no matter who you were. I mean, that...

itself is a decision. We could have decided to make different rules for public figures or people that were influencers or, you know, whatever. But I do think that like the idea that there is procedural fairness in these rules was like, I think what we should have always been aiming for and procedural consistency. And that is something that we have we have really lost sight of and are just focusing on the substantive nature of these policies, which is going to be all political all the time and subject to like rough control.

So let's talk about this in the context of the EU and the geopolitical strife that I think we're heading to that you called out very directly. The governments of the EU have come together and said, OK, actually, we do want some amount of regulation on these platforms. We do want some amount of disinformation control. We do want some amount of fact-checking. Obviously, the history of speech controls in Europe is very different than the history of speech controls in the United States, especially with our First Amendment. Is it as simple as Mark Zuckerberg has –

traded a bunch of bigotry to Donald Trump so that he can get some leverage over the EU and not be subject to the Digital Services Act? That certainly is what it was signaled as to me. And one part of this is that was, I mean, for me, that has been the least reported part of this. The main part of it that really shocked me was the Zuckerberg moment in which he said, we are partnering with or we're teaming with President Trump.

to bring free expression around the world, as if it was like Pepsi and KFC getting together to do a cross endorsement for the Super Bowl, for the love of God. Like this is like a nation state and like a huge, maybe one of the largest transnational companies that controls speech ever to exist in the world. And they're going to partner. And at the same time, you're going to be

telling us about how much you believe in the First Amendment, which is explicitly that government should not be controlling our speech. And so anyways, I saw this as very much, it is becoming insanely expensive under the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act to comply and not have fines constantly leveraged against them in Europe. The high watermark that they're going to get held to of what it means to comply is an expensive one. And

Europe, this is such a broadly written law that like at any given moment they can decide, yes, you are out of compliance and we're going to hit you with a hundred million dollar fine. And no one likes the tech companies in Europe. And so frankly, if the law says they can do this and there's no real definition, then why not decide that these words don't mean that you properly assessed the risk to operate in France and you're a hundred million dollars lighter for it. And on top of that,

There's a lot of content that's illegal in Europe because they don't have a First Amendment that would be legal in the United States. So there is more stuff that is required to get taken down and which might disagree with kind of the American notions of free expression that we have. But Europe is not an authoritarian state. It is a democracy. People like that people vote the people in that make these laws that decide to make certain types of speech illegal. These are like reflective of their norms.

So all of this is to say that, yes, this is kind of this moment in which you saw Zuckerberg bend the knee to the FTC and Carr bend the knee to... People say that that announcement was to an audience of one and the audience is Trump. It was not to Trump. That was a complete...

like capitulation to Brendan Carr and the FCC. That was, please don't take away Section 230. We've gotten rid of your fact-checking program. We're giving business and money to Texas. You're getting all of these words of slurs put into this conversation. We're putting...

transphobia back into the universe as like a, as a thing that we're okay with everyone doing in the name of civil discourse for reasons like things I don't understand at all. And then the trade-off, the long-term trade-off is, is kind of the chance to do business in China. And

to have Trump's backing, whether it's pulling out NATO or creating tariffs, if Europe decides to play super hardball with the tech companies. And it's like, it's clear as day. One of the tensions I see here is that we live through a moment where we thought these platforms are doing something really beneficial. But there

There's the Arab Spring in 2011, where it seemed like exporting First Amendment-style values around speech online wasn't particularly liberal or conservative, but an overall American cultural export. This led to this self-conception in Silicon Valley that these companies were making the world a better place in some way. And that really drove things for a minute. But it feels like things have gotten tighter in a lot of ways since then.

Europe directly regulates some speech on platforms. India regulates a lot of speech on platforms. China bans some of these platforms. The U.S. government is all tied up in knots over China controlling a major platform in TikTok and what users can or can't say there. Is that the change we're seeing?

In the late 90s, early 2000s, when the companies were making these types of decisions, we were in a different technological age. Things were a little bit, like, they were fast, but they were, like, not as fast as they are now. And they were not as huge. Like, the scale was huge, but the scale was still not, like, quite, like, the same. And there just was not really a reckoning and an understanding by politicians, by nation states, how much the bringing speech technology

to other countries was not a neutral good or it was maybe a chaotic good at best. And what I mean by that, and I teach this, is like there's like the John Perry Barlow idea of the internet, of like this great thing that frees you from governments. But we put governments in place because they also protect us and do certain types of things. And like, it turns out that there were a lot of bad things that like a free and open internet brought us as well with a broad

It brought like massive amounts of, you know, of harassment and violence and like kind of all these other types of problems, especially to certain types of like minority groups whose rights were not respected. And it took like a while for us to see both of those things. But it has been like...

The advent of smartphones and broadband have just kind of created a sea change, and that really did not kind of start taking place until the middle teens. So to your point, I think that you can say what you said.

About bringing like kind of American ideals and notions of free speech to the rest of the world. But it was also a different Internet then. And we knew less about the harms that it could create. And a lot of people slowly walked back those positions and thought and like that did a lot of that work of private companies, walked back those positions and ended up going into like government and politics.

promoting ideas of like, let's create policies that are reflective and we can geo-politically bound by like what the wills of like the people that we're putting these products into place for are. The illusions of a borderless world is a real idea. It's not a borderless world. Like the internet is full of borders. We need to take another quick break, but when we come back, we'll put this all together and talk about TikTok.

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Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Welcome back. I'm talking with law professor Kate Klonick about all the social media platform changes we're seeing right now and how they relate to what's happening with TikTok. So we should talk about all this in the context of TikTok. If TikTok remains banned, meta stands to benefit. Everyone will use their platforms or they might use YouTube instead, but certainly a big competitor will go away.

TikTok was banned by application of the law. Then Trump said, I want to unban it. It's back in some fashion, although it's not all the way back in the app stores. And the company itself is making desperate pleas to Donald Trump to save it. Shou Chu, the CEO, was at the inauguration. What do you think is happening with TikTok right now?

There are only really a few options to bring TikTok back in the United States. And why would you want to bring TikTok back when you went to all of the work of passing this and writing this law, everything else? Well, the political winds have shifted. And now Trump loves nothing more than to be the hero of our story. The Supreme Court issued this decision and

and said, listen, we're upholding this ban. We're upholding the reasons for doing this. Like, be they right or wrong, we could get into the nitty gritty, but it wasn't even that long or interesting an opinion. But the more interesting thing was that 100% kicked this issue to Trump. Like, this is only like a Trump issue now. Saving TikTok rests with him if it's going to be saved.

And in that, there are only a few options. He can issue an EO, which is effectively worthless, like on its own, to basically say like, hey, like I'm pro TikTok. Those bad guys before me banned TikTok, but I want to bring it back. That doesn't actually do anything. You can't have an EO that just overturns a law. That would be like a real balance of powers issue. He can order his Department of Justice, however, to not enforce the law in the same way.

the same way that there's like a standing non-enforcement of cannabis distribution in the United States under federal law, right? And they leave it primarily up to the states. But we don't have a federal cannabis trade for a reason because like you kind of can't

can't tell if they're going to at some point like decide to like all of a sudden enforce the law against you. And there's nothing except someone's good word to carry the day. And Trump is not exactly known for his steadfastness and his non-mercurial like whims of fancy. He is a complete like reckless kind of leader and feckless for that matter. And so anyways, he can issue a DOJ. But when you're sitting and staring at the at the

fines that I think that like that Oracle and Apple and Google are looking at in the hundreds of billions of dollars. I don't know how you keep operating. Those are the two options. And then the third option is you actually meet the terms of the law and have an investment. We're nowhere near that at all. No one is anywhere close to meeting these standards.

standards. And Trump is trying to bring the parties to the table to basically like make this divestment happen, which ByteDance, as we all know, has like adamantly agreed that they're not going to have a meaningful divestment. And so you will have eventually some, I think, some type of off

that looks like a divestment, but actually like they still get to run most of it. And like Trump kind of like squints at these papers on his desk and is like, yeah, that's a meaningful divestment and decides to see the terms of the ban met and lift the ban on TikTok. So what you have right now is I guess the first two things that I said. He's issued the EO yesterday.

In that same EO, he has said exactly what I predicted about the DOJ and non-enforcement. And he's made overtures that he's going to start wheeling and dealing. Essentially, we'll get TikTok back if and only if some type of conversation happens around divestment. And really, I think that that ends up being a much larger conversation about China and geopolitics and giving the Chinese what they want in other realms that are not tech-based.

Weirdly, like we might end up training Taiwan, unfortunately, for TikTok. And I feel like that would be like just just terrible. Like we were just like in some really weird scenarios here. I'm hoping that we start with tariffs and not Taiwan. But I agree with you that the Chinese government is going to show up and say, if you want us to approve a sale of not just TikTok US, but the underlying algorithm, which they've adamantly said they will not sell, which is what makes TikTok good.

then you will have to have some concession somewhere. The piece of the puzzle that's really interesting to me, just in the context of Facebook and moderation and the amount of pressure that's being put on our speech platforms, is the EO doesn't mean anything right now. Like Apple and Google have not put this app back in their stores. I don't think they can trust it. In TikTok itself, if it does get sold or divested or allowed to continue, then

They've already said they will owe that to Trump. Just in the context of moderation, TikTok is now beholden to President Trump to make a deal. They're saying it as explicitly as they can in the app to the users. There's a real sense here that when this is all said and done, that all of our social platforms will now face incredible pressure, if not outright allegiance to the president. Do you think that's going to play out on TikTok? Do you think they can just adjust the algorithm or they will adjust the algorithm to please Trump?

Trump, who saved the platform? Oh, absolutely. There's nothing to indicate that they would do anything other than that. I thought that the obsequious kind of banners that they put up, the dear leader-ness of them was so, like, so strong, you know, on Sunday when TikTok went down, then it went up again. Yeah, absolutely.

All of this is like going to be deeply ironic because we started off in the sense that we're going after this unfree authoritarian platform. And what are we going to be ending up with? But kind of recreating that on like driving all of those users to another platform.

platform run by the like run by the ccp and also just recreating what it is that tick tock does for china within the boundaries of the us by kind of like whitewashing and delivering only favorable media to its users i mean there's nothing to indicate that that wouldn't happen there's just nothing if this was maybe 10 years older i'd be like no

That's like, that's crazy. But we wouldn't be in this scenario 10 years ago. So like, I have to say that these platforms are like not neutral. And now the propaganda and the content that you see is just like, obviously, and much more than it was even a year ago, obviously, and openly pushed by a political party or a political kind of regime. No one seems even ashamed about doing that. One of the things that's really interesting about TikTok specifically compared to Facebook is

is that TikTok was the most tightly moderated of the major social platforms. This is the platform that gave us the word "unalive." I think it's very funny that the word "segs" exists, S-E-G-G-S, because users think even saying the word "sex" will get them deranked or deboosted from the algorithm.

How do you think that plays with Mark Zuckerberg saying, screw it, slurs are legal now? Like there's a real tension here between what Trump is saying he wants, which is just go for it, just do slurs. And Mark saying, OK, and TikTok and what its product is, which is the most tightly regulated and has the user base most attuned to what the content moderation standards are.

"Oh my god, Eli, there you go acting like the world makes sense again." Like, what the hell? No, of course this makes no sense. There are so many parts of the free speech and free expression environments that these people, be they tech leaders, be they political leaders, or be they even lawyers or FCC chairpeople, have been espousing that

contradicts a fundamental notion of freedom of expression that it's like, it's, I mean, what they are political animals who are driven by outcomes. And there's no, the masks have fallen off. Basically, what Trump wanted was Zuckerberg to kiss the ring. And Zuckerberg has kissed the ring. He doesn't actually care if like, conservatives are censored in some type of way on like on Facebook, and there'll be a little less publicity.

censored now. What he cares about now vis-a-vis TikTok is not like the message of TikTok. That was, by the way, never like the real concern in the Supreme Court would like draw a line under that, that like the content that was on TikTok was not the problem. It was the data privacy of U.S. citizens and sensitive data privacy information going to the Chinese. And so that is like

I mean, in my mind, these are not actually contradictory if you're Donald Trump. And the point of leveraging a ban against TikTok was always to bring China to the table in some type of geopolitical way. And now the point of unbanning TikTok is to like make yourself a hero to like the youths.

And maybe save the day with like some type of deal with China that makes everyone happy and paints you as this great world leader. I think that this is unfortunately the days of procedural consistency or any type of substantive outcomes that are actually free expression protective is like long gone.

I'm going to throw another wild card into this mix because I agree with you. And then Trump said something so out there that it actually feels like it loops back around to being protective of free expression in one particular way. He has said that he'd like the United States to enter into a joint venture as part of whatever TikTok deal gets done, whereby the United States owns 50 percent of TikTok.

Very specifically, he has not said a United States corporation. He says the United States. We should own it. He's also, to your point about leverage, he's been very clear that if he doesn't approve this deal, TikTok is worth nothing. And if he does approve it, it's worth a lot of money. So they'd better make a deal. Classic Trump.

But this notion that the United States government would somehow own 50% of TikTok seems to directly implicate the First Amendment, right? Would that ever work? It just seems fundamentally impossible for the government to control an online platform because they would have to let so much speech through as part of the First Amendment that the platform would be unworkable.

It wouldn't be a very good platform, would it? If the government was to own a platform, it would have to comply with the First Amendment, which would mean that there would be huge swaths of material and content that it could not take down under the First Amendment, that it would have to let people see or post.

And that includes a lot of content that is currently taken down by platforms now. This is the so-called like lawful but awful kind of content. So this is like, you know, spam. Spam is completely legal under the First Amendment. The government can't block spam in your post office box or online. But government can't.

Content providers take this down all the time, obviously. Pornography, good and bad pornography, anything from crush videos to traditional kind of salacious material, those are all protected by the First Amendment. Those would all stay up. Anonymous accounts.

So like there would be no real name policy or anything like even approaching that because anonymity is explicitly protected by the First Amendment. And so all of these things would have to stay up. It would be a very unusable platform if this was the case. And the only option would be to change the First Amendment doctrine, which I feel the the Supreme Court, well, who knows, would be loathe to completely undo all of

that and suddenly decide that after years and years and years, pornography is now removable by the government. Though, I mean, that is the type of thing that we could get into. But basically, at the very, at the fore, at the basic levels, the stuff that would stay up on these platforms would make them borderline unusable.

Put that in the context of geopolitics. I get the sense that Trump is like, well, China owns a bunch of ByteDance. They control ByteDance. Why shouldn't the United States control TikTok? Like, why isn't that the trade I'm making? I hear that from our audience, right? Like, why shouldn't we have more stringent speech controls on some of these platforms? Like, why shouldn't we do COSA, right? The Kids Online Safety Act.

And then you get into the speech concerns and the history of how we approach the First Amendment online, especially. And you're like, well, these are incompatible ideas. Like something has to give. But if you zoom out to the level of geopolitics,

one giant nuclear superpower owns a speech platform that can operate around the world and the other one is not allowed to by its own internal rules. I can see it. You're like, okay, well, sure, we want to export American norms and culture. Maybe we should dump some money into this and control it. Like, does that just not play? Is it not possible to give on that level?

You'd have to change the internal rules. You'd have to have the Supreme Court decide that certain types of things were or were not legal under the First Amendment. Honestly, like in this day and age, this is complete. And the Supreme Court, that's not off the table, in my opinion, unfortunately.

But like, again, to the outcomes of this, like you said, China has like this platform and they have this advantage. And so we seem like we have this disadvantage. I don't know. We have the global market. China has not exported communications tech in the way that the United States has. And that is not just because of the tech that is actually, I think, because of the structure of language.

Like, honestly, the entire world doesn't default to Chinese. And so we have like this massive advantage that like there has been English language viewing of entertainment and culture coming out of the United States. There's a reason that we have Hollywood and all of these other types of kind of entertainment hubs. When I wrote about this really early on in 2006 and 2007, even the default in content moderation that you leave things up

And then it's like leave things up until someone reports something or someone is unhappy or until you get notified that they break a rule of some kind. But the default is that you leave stuff up.

is like itself a First Amendment normative view. Like it is itself built into the very code of these platforms, which is not how Europe kind of operates about this thing. They think a lot more stuff automatically should come down. And it's definitely not the way China and TikTok operate, which TikTok is actually like, we're going to pick what you see and feed it to you, which is the opposite.

of like, you know, of like, let everything stay up. We're going to like, we're going to pick a few things to stay up. And this is what you'll watch. I would just kind of push back on the idea that like, that America is at a disadvantage in this way. I just think that we actually have a lot more global staying power in markets than the Chinese. And that is actually not to be discounted right off the bat.

I'd like to thank Kate Klonick for joining me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have thoughts about this episode or what you'd like to hear more of, you can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. And for now...

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