"If the deal closes, it will be a long-term disaster for any left-of-center political project. Imagine Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, but on very powerful steroids. Twitter gave him agenda-setting power on an app that most elite political journalists will never quit. It also made him a kingpin and punched his ticket to serve as co-leader of the free world for several months."
"Whether X was a tool of mass political persuasion in the 2024 election is less clear, though. The platform is a black box now that Musk has taken it private, and it's overrun with spam and A.I. accounts. It's also orders of magnitude smaller than TikTok. A conservative takeover of TikTok will be a much bigger problem for American liberalism, and anything left of it, than X could ever be."
A proposed transaction would transfer effective control of TikTok's recommendation algorithm to American investors aligned with conservative media, a move promoted by former President Trump. The deal appears unfinished even as the administration behaves as if it were complete. Democrats are advised to vocally oppose the transaction and scrutinize the political choices that enabled the situation, including Biden and congressional leadership. The takeover could amplify conservative agenda-setting on a mass scale, exceeding the influence of Elon Musk's Twitter due to TikTok's vastly larger, algorithm-driven, news-hungry global user base.
Read at Slate Magazine
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