Fair or Foul

Who will be moderating TikTok now under these new owners? Who, from this board of Trump allies, will be setting the policies? We can expect a significant portion of TikTok’s users will be unconvinced by Trump’s assertion that “everyone’s going to be treated fairly” on the platform.
The TikTok Signing Was Good Theater But Only the First Act

I don't think that the "significant portion of TikTok’s users" are necessarily wrong in their skepticism of President Trump, mainly because I note that the President said "fairly," and not "equally." President Trump comes across as one of those people for whom "fair" means something along the lines of "in accordance with what they deserve," and it's pretty clear that, as a committed egoist and partisan, that what people deserve is judged in accordance with how he feels they treat him and Trumpism.

In this sense, the President isn't being dishonest. Disingenuous, perhaps, but not dishonest. Because I don't think that I'm the only person who understands what President Trump thinks of as "fair." Even if the President isn't being clear about it in the moment.

Given the way that the President has acted up to this point in his second term, one would be foolish to think that all political perspectives are going to given equal time on a TikTok run by people who support the President or want his support in turn. Because the President, and his supporters, have very clear ideas of which political outlooks are legitimate, and which are not. And so those TikTokkers who are left of center, let alone openly Socialist or Communist, are going to find that a Trumpist-run TikTok actively works against them. And to the President's mind, that will be fair, because they're bad people, and bad people don't deserve a platform for their ideas. And with Trump allies controlling the moderation of TikTok, the political Left in the United States will have less of one.

In this sense, it's worth taking the President at his word, if for no other reason than to understand how he sees the world and the role of social media platforms in it. The problem with TikTok has stopped being that ByteDance is beholden to the government of China, and thus cannot be trusted to push back against requests for data about American citizens that China may want to exert leverage against, and has morphed into TikTok having the potential to be a way for the President to broadcast his message to people who have no real interest in signing up for Truth Social and/or have fled X. And while TikTok, under the control of allies of the President, is less likely to make an effective intelligence platform for the Chinese Communist Party, it's more or less guaranteed to be to pressed into service as a bullhorn for the Republican Party. And I suspect that there's an impression that TikTok's audience is more captive than X's, and therefore more likely to stay awhile, and listen to the President's messaging. Whether or not the bet that there won't be an exodus pays off remains to be seen, but I think that a lot of people regard it as fairly safe.

David Frum once noted the following about the workings of justice in China in The Atlantic: “What’s really going on here is something once explained to me (in a different context) by a China-watcher: ‘They say that an official who has done wrong will lose power. But what really happens is that an official who loses power will be accused of doing wrong’.” And this encapsulates the President's idea of "fairness." Now that the Left is out of power in Washington D.C., it is accused of doing wrong. And the Trump allies who are poised to purchase the American branch of TikTok (if it ever happens) understand this. And as long as Donald Trump is allowed to position himself as the final arbiter of fairness in American society, any media outlet he comes to control will reflect that.