On the menu today: Back in September, the editors of National Review argued that any deal designed to preserve the operation of TikTok must completely separate it from the Chinese company ByteDance. (Chinese national security laws require that all Chinese companies, including ByteDance, acquiesce to Beijing’s demands for intelligence, and the Chinese government has a seat on ByteDance’s board.) Instead, the Trump administration has given its blessing to a deal that allows ByteDance to keep 19.9 percent of the company, keeps the new U.S. entity run by a longtime TikTok senior executive, and that will “retrain the algorithm on U.S. data.” This is a complete violation of the law and is selling out American national security interests. As you would expect, the president is taking a victory lap over the deal. Also, there’s a good chance you’ve always held former President Bill Clinton in contempt, and now a bipartisan majority of the House Oversight Committee agrees with you. Read on.
Ignoring the TikTok Security Threat
A bit more than two weeks ago, this newsletter warned that the deal that would preserve TikTok would not sufficiently address the concerns that the Chinese government, through ByteDance, is using the app to spread anti-American propaganda and suppress criticism of the regime in Beijing.
This morning, in the Wall Street Journal: “Trump and TikTok’s investors and allies pushed the deal through despite lingering concerns among lawmakers and security hawks that China could still influence the new entity through TikTok parent ByteDance, which owns almost 20 percent of it.”
That arrangement may fall short of the 2024 law, which required the divestment to end any “operational relationship” between ByteDance and TikTok in the United States, critics said.
“They may have saved TikTok,” said Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Hudson Institute. “But the national security concerns are still going to continue.”
Back in September, Sobolik and Marc Short — former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, and director of legislative affairs in Trump’s first term — pointed out that any deal that merely has the U.S. “license” the algorithm doesn’t address the heart of the problem:
This may sound like a compromise, but it is in fact a capitulation. Licensing is not ownership and monitoring is not control. As long as ByteDance retains the ability to alter the algorithm from Beijing, the CCP will preserve one of its most powerful tools for influencing American minds and waging psychological warfare against the West. The administration implicitly concedes the deal’s weakness by touting Oracle’s ability to “fully inspect” the algorithm. What the administration cannot quite bring itself to say is that those inspections will be searching for evidence of ByteDance’s ongoing manipulation of the platform.
The new entity will be responsible for moderating content on TikTok and protecting the data of U.S. users. It will be governed by a new, seven-member, majority-American board. TikTok’s Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew — who will continue running ByteDance’s most valuable asset globally — will have a seat on the board. Adam Presser, who was TikTok’s head of operations, trust and safety, will helm the U.S. venture as its CEO.
Much like in Venezuela, meet the new boss, who worked closely with the old boss. Adam Presser has been with TikTok in senior roles since April 2022.
In March 2023, TikTok banned the account of former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom, an outspoken critic of the Chinese government. His account was restored after twelve days, as CEO Shou Zi Chew was testifying on Capitol Hill that Americans’ TikTok feeds were not restricted by China’s censorship rules. The app said that Freedom’s account had been banned by “an error.”
In May 2023, TikTok banned the account of the Michigan-based Acton Institute after it posted videos about Hong Kong pro-democracy icon Jimmy Lai and the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on the city.
At the time, Presser was TikTok’s vice president and chief of staff.
Remember back in October 2023, when certain TikTok users described their feeds as suddenly filling up with anti-Israel and pro-Hamas videos? “When I engaged with one post on TikTok supporting opposing views, my entire feed became aggressively anti-Israel. It was as if I was placed in an AB test variant and was told to see this war with Israel being the evil side. . . . Because the TikTok narrative is now so anti-Israel, the engagement flywheel encourages creators to support that narrative because it’s getting the most attention and creating anti-Israel content helps them increase their following.”
Or do you remember a month later, in November 2023, when a slew of TikTok users suddenly started approvingly quoting a 2002 letter from al-Qaeda terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, and arguing that the terrorist mastermind made a lot of good points? TikTok belatedly concluded, “Content promoting bin Laden’s letter violates TikTok’s rules on supporting terrorism.”
In December 2023, a Rutgers University study found “a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government.” Joel Finkelstein, a founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, said, “It’s not believable that this could happen organically.”
From June 2023 to March 2024, Presser was head of operations for TikTok.
Yes, the people who now oversee the TikTok algorithm are Americans, but the guy running the show is the same American who was overseeing the algorithm before this deal, when we were having all the problems that made the algorithm a national security issue!
President Trump, on Truth Social, last night: “Along with other factors, it was responsible for my doing so well with the Youth Vote in the 2024 Presidential Election. I only hope that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok. . . . I would also like to thank President Xi, of China, for working with us and, ultimately, approving the Deal. He could have gone the other way, but didn’t, and is appreciated for his decision.”
We have a president who wants to be loved by the young Americans who use TikTok. And to keep the app operating, his administration ignored federal law banning it and shoved through this deal which hand-waves away the national security concerns.
ADDENDUM: Nine Democrats on the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Bill Clinton in contempt for refusing to testify about his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein. (Another two profiles in courage voted “present.”)
Over in that other Washington publication, I point out to Post readers that the vote is a sign that, decades late, Democrats are tired of covering for Bill Clinton and dealing with his sordid, entitled drama. When you’ve spent months, perhaps years, pounding the table pledging to get to the bottom of all of Epstein’s abominable deeds and tracking down anyone else who broke the law alongside him, you can’t just shrug off a former president refusing to testify before a congressional committee.
Bill Clinton has never agreed to any interview on the topic of Jeffrey Epstein. He has, through a spokesman, put out rare, terse, and vague statements that do not align with known facts. He mentioned Epstein for one brief passage in his memoir, claiming, “I had always thought Epstein was odd, but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing.”
Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Angel Ureña, put out a recent statement about the Clintons, saying, “Neither had anything to do with him for more than 20 years.” Of course, Epstein has been dead for seven of those years, so it would be difficult to have much to do with him during that period.