The (unfortunate) genius of Trump’s PR team

The front row of Trump’s second inauguration on Monday was more like a who’s who of tech billionaires. But while Amazon, Meta and X all got a FROW look-in, TikTok was noticeably regulated to the back, like a naughty school kid. Maybe because TikTok isn’t American……yet.

Where to start with this modern-day Empire-building tale?

Possibly with a potted and topline history of TikTok, who owns it and where in the world it can be accessed from? Ok, here goes….

TikTok was launched in September 2016 by the Chinese tech company ByteDance under the name "Douyin" for the Chinese market. In 2017, ByteDance introduced an international version of the app, branded as TikTok.

TikTok expanded significantly after merging with the app Musical.ly in August 2018, which already had a large user base in the U.S. This helped TikTok quickly establish itself globally. It currently operates with distinct regional teams and separate apps to comply with local regulations worldwide.

History lesson over. Let’s go back to inauguration day or more accurately, just before it.

A mere 48hrs ahead of Trump beginning his second term as POTUS, TikTok was banned in America. Back in April 2024, Biden signed a law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. company or face a shutdown, amid fears that China's involvement posed a national security threat. Interestingly, it was Trump who had started rantings about TikTok’s threat to national security back in 2021, and even more interestingly the Democrats and the Republicans both agreed that this law needed to be passed.

Only ByteDance didn’t want to sell, so America shut it down, TWO DAYS before Trump came back into power.  Here’s where is gets even more interesting - with the greatest double-bluff in history (like a scene from the Traitors) the TikTok blackout in America came with a message hailing Trump as its potential saviour.

Confused yet? Yep. Me too, but let’s keep going…..

Then less than 24hrs after the blackout, TikTok returned to devices across the land of the ‘free’, with an ingratiating thank you to Trump for reversing its potential doom.

Man. That guy’s propaganda machine is good. They concocted a cunning plan; get America’s favourite toy taken away and then position SuperDonald as the hero who brings it back. Absolute genius.

Of course, long term Trump and his cronies may still revert back to the original Republican stance, that it needs to be owned by America (much like Greenland or the Panama Canal.) It’ll be interesting to see which of his tech-billionaire boyfriends will add TikTok to their portfolio - if they haven’t already, in a deal brokered by SuperDonald, obvs.

In the meantime, US users in their thousands have been flooding to Red Note. The cultural revolution happening on that particular Mandarin-speaking platform is a whole other blog post!

Btw, in case you were wondering my money is on Bezos for the Panama Canal – easy for shipping those unnecessarily large Amazon boxes. Zuckerberg will get Greenland, on account of his well hard masculinity (he can cope with the climate.) Oh, and don’t worry about Musk being left out, he’s got the whole of space to play with 😉