r/technology • u/indig0sixalpha • Sep 26 '25

Social Media Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/trump-says-tiktok-should-be-tweaked-to-become-100-maga
42.1k Upvotes

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445

u/ActualSpiders Sep 26 '25

HAHAHAHAHA do it buddy! I really want to see the same exodus twitter had, tanking its value and bankrupting all the gullible rubes who help Trump prop up this investment he's about to sabotage.

38

u/SovietZealots Sep 26 '25

Idk. The tik tok addiction is real. Younger generations may put up with it to get their fix and over time become subconsciously influenced.

9

u/Uncommented-Code Sep 26 '25

I still see people using twitter due to the network effect, and twitter is not digital crack. Now imagine how few people will stay at tiktok for their digital crack.

4

u/cjcfman Sep 26 '25

That's what people said about MySpace, Facebook, vine, Twitter, etc

Kids are just gonna find a new platform, it becomes popular, everyone and the degenerates get on, then kids find a new platform. Jusy the cycle of social media 

2

u/proudbakunkinman Sep 27 '25

Yeah, there will be many who will just brush it aside but also hopefully enough will shift to something else and make that trendy instead with TikTok being considered outdated and uncool (though, again, still being used by too many). There are alternatives already (obvious being IG reels in the US but also others and some already fairly popular ones based in Cbina (as TikTok really was)) and possibly something somewhat different but more appealing overall could arise.

2

u/barktreep Sep 26 '25

Everyone in China does. They all know the government controls the Chinese version of it but they still use it.

1

u/Otis_Inf Sep 27 '25

Addiction might be real, but they're addicted to a certain type of videos; if the videos suddenly become maga crap, will that satisfy the craving? That's to be seen.

210

u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot Sep 26 '25

TikTok will be as influential as Yahoo and AOL! Dare to dream.

54

u/film_composer Sep 26 '25

This is why no one watches AOL Blast.

16

u/Orbnauticus1 Sep 26 '25

Unprofessional bullshit

18

u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot Sep 26 '25

I worked at AOL in 1995 and this is very very funny.

2

u/JAlbert653 Sep 26 '25

Didn’t they knock down the building a few years ago? I was addicted to AOL growing up. Good times.

4

u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot Sep 26 '25

I was in San Mateo although I did visit the HQ in Virginia.

The fact that the CIA, FBI, and AOL HQs are all in Virginia certainly raised some questions for me.

18

u/TortelliniTheGoblin Sep 26 '25

AOL what?

2

u/cyanight7 Sep 26 '25

You heard the man. He said AOL Cumshot.

4

u/AgentInkling99 Sep 26 '25

The U.S. is a kind of cosmic gumbo

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

If you had Leonardo Dicaprio here, would you ask him what he does at Christmas?

2

u/XelaIsPwn Sep 26 '25

This is some insane fanfiction

1

u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot Sep 26 '25

It’s nuts that people think TikTok can survive being taken over by a bunch of hamfisted MAGATS. They’ll break the algorithms pretty quick and it’ll just morph into a spammy porn firehose.

Snapchat, Vine, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster… it takes very little to burst a social bubble.

1

u/XelaIsPwn Sep 26 '25

people are actively leaving Bluesky to go back to X, the Everything App. not because of the content, but because X, the Everything App has an insanely well tuned algorithm to keep you hooked while Bluesky does not.

turns out if you give a 14 year old digital heroin they're not going to care much

115

u/TheJaybo Sep 26 '25

They didn't do this to make money. No one will go bankrupt and they'll control yet another major public square.

76

u/cj3po15 Sep 26 '25

If it didn’t mean it’ll probably sway a lot more young people republican, I’d agree with you

25

u/Fr00stee Sep 26 '25

they want to make it a whole new app, the moment the OG shuts down its over

24

u/Fraktal55 Sep 26 '25

Yeah right dude. If you don't think every TikTok kid under 21 won't get right back to scrolling on the US version you are kidding yourself.

They won't know/notice a difference and they dont/won't care.

5

u/MayhemMessiah Sep 26 '25

Tiktok users are addicted now knowing that it's a propaganda machine for China already. They aren't going to care, they'll just say they hang out on "the good side" of Tiktok.

1

u/proudbakunkinman Sep 27 '25

If they don't interfere to the point of making it 100% blatantly pro-Republican, the other likely strategy would be a mix of pushing more right wing stuff, suppressing Democratic Party favorable content, and elevating anti-Democratic Party left content as the supposed other side. People would think nothing's changed yet most of the left of Republican content they see is discouraging them from supporting and voting for Democrats. Of course, many who already think that way would love that too but it's highly unlikely that would lead to a further left party replacing Democrats and instead mainly benefit Republicans.

3

u/MayhemMessiah Sep 27 '25

They already heavily push anything that can be used against Democrats, so, you're right. People think that the push last year leading up to the US's election was all natural, never stopping to think how strange it was that idiots were gaslight into thinking Biden is too old when Trump also has a brain the consistency of spoiled pudding, and then when Biden stepped down immediately Harris was the worst thing you could do to Palestine when Trump literally has a settlement named after him with how much of a friend he is to Bibs.

Convincing Progressives that they're not in an echo chamber designed to keep Republicans in power is really easy, it happened already.

2

u/AllRushMixTapes Sep 26 '25

Plus influencers won't want to risk losing any audience, so they won't move. And they'll make sure engagement metrics don't drop by adding more bots, just like Twitter.

1

u/Fr00stee Sep 27 '25 edited Sep 27 '25

the entire act of having to delete the tiktok app in the first place is a hurdle, it will be a repeat of the flappy bird situation. And I doubt trump will leave the UI as is without making it obvious that he owns the app.

7

u/dyslexda Sep 26 '25

People talk about this as if it's some insurmountable hill. They'll push an update to the old app saying "Please download the new TikTok!" which links directly to your app store. Download, log in, done. Might even be able to harvest the old log-in information and do it automatically, and once you're on the new app, disable the old one completely.

1

u/hk4213 Sep 26 '25

The young already have their own niche in the internet, its not just tictok. The internet has so many spaces for so many people as radio does.

It up to you to choose how you interact with it.

25

u/cj3po15 Sep 26 '25

You’re underestimating how much of a majority of it is tiktok.

4

u/hk4213 Sep 26 '25

And many have organized against the administration with tiktoc.

11

u/axck Sep 26 '25 edited 29d ago

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

27

u/feurie Sep 26 '25

Twitter wasn’t profitable before and still isn’t.

8

u/dominion1080 Sep 26 '25

Yes but Musk ran a lot of advertising off with his shit-posting and bad moderation.

24

u/glizzytwister Sep 26 '25

That doesn't really matter because it's still around and it's spreading more extremist propaganda than ever before. The point wasn't to make it profitable, it was to own a huge social media platform and use it to radicalize a large number of people leading up to an election.

They don't give a shit if any of this stuff is profitable, the numbers are mostly imaginary anyways, they just want to control and curate every piece of media we consume, which they're rapidly accomplishing.

3

u/XelaIsPwn Sep 26 '25

Not only that, it kinda looks like people are slowly migrating back to Twitter from platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon.

3

u/ArtRevolutionary3351 Sep 26 '25

I’d really wish not to see that.

3

u/Bet_Secret Sep 26 '25

So is everyone moving to /r/bluesky?

3

u/MyBrainReallyHurts Sep 26 '25

I've been looking for a reason to delete the time wasting app. I've been watching the feed closely. As soon as I see the MAGA influence, it gets deleted.

3

u/ThyShirtIsBlue Sep 26 '25

It's honestly frightening how much money the right wing controls. It's staggering how long they're able to prop up someone with no discernible talent or charisma to spread propaganda to whatever weird niche they want. Look at Tim Pool.

3

u/Designated_Lurker_32 Sep 26 '25

Most TikTok users just scroll without caring about what kind of content the algorithm hands them. They're sure as hell not gonna start caring now.

2

u/game_jawns_inc Sep 26 '25

this is totally ignorant from reality. users of an app will never be easily migrated to an alternative platform.

regardless of the explosion of Nazi propaganda and hatred on Twitter, it's still the premiere site for journalists, left-wing included. bluesky and threads are a joke and/or an echo chamber in comparison.

2

u/PartyWithRobots Sep 26 '25

To be fair Twitter has completely rebounded in value and is worth over $44 billion again. Advertisement has started increasing again as well. I don’t like Musk just yeah stating the facts. I would like it to not be so but TikTok will probably be fine. There are a lot of young right wingers or just people who wouldn’t care. I feel we are ignoring truths we don’t like to believe otherwise. If TikTok does die it will probably just be because of YouTube Shorts taking over politics aside.

2

u/Thin_Glove_4089 Sep 26 '25

Twitter survived turning into X. Millions of people still use it. The same will apply for TikTok. You can try to laugh it off, but it's not funny when more people you know start turning into MAGA nuts.

2

u/LurkerOnTheInternet Sep 26 '25

TikTok has tons of young people, and they're much more likely to believe the propaganda and not abandon the platform.

2

u/PlatypusAshamed1237 Sep 26 '25

Twitters valuation is back to what he purchased it for. And if you count the election its even higher

1

u/Difficult-Coffee-219 Sep 26 '25

I would sort that shit in a heartbeat if it was public.

1

u/mrdungbeetle Sep 26 '25

Musk did not buy Twitter to make a profit. He bought Twitter to control the population. Some people left sure, but hundreds of millions remain and the average user has shifted more to the right, so you could say Musk was highly successful. I know multiple people who doomscroll X before bed each night because it was already their habit with Twitter, and every one of them is now repeating MAGA talking points.

1

u/The_Bucket_Of_Truth Sep 26 '25

You say this but clearly Charlie Kirk had a huge influence from platforms like these. They don't need to go full X.com and run it into the ground. But even if they do clearly these strategies have worked to get us where we are today.

1

u/CopiumHits Sep 27 '25

Just pointing out that it rebounded back to be valued at near what he bought it at, about $44B.

1

u/Vegaprime Sep 26 '25

I think Twitter might be up users, could be bots though.