Among all the images of people cozying up to President Donald Trump at today’s inauguration, one in particular will be worth remembering over the next four years. During the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, you could see some of the most powerful men on the planet positioned immediately behind members of the Trump family on the dais. There’s Tiffany, there’s Eric, there’s Ivanka and Don, Jr., and then, smiling and clapping right alongside the family, the tech titans: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook. In visual proximity, they’re as close to honorary Trumps as anyone could be.

The power that each of these men represents may be rivaled by only the presidency itself. Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta; Bezos founded Amazon and Blue Origin and owns The Washington Post; Pichai runs Google; Musk heads Tesla and SpaceX and owns X; Cook is Apple’s CEO. TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, was also in attendance in a back row, and OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was reportedly seated in the overflow crowd in Emancipation Hall. These business leaders directly control the tools that billions of people around the world use to communicate, to receive information, to be entertained, to navigate and understand the world. Even an incomplete list of products overseen by these people is striking: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Gmail, Google Search, Google Docs, Android, iPhones, iPads, Macs, iMessage, Starlink, ChatGPT, TikTok—the world’s foremost technology platforms, in line behind Donald Trump.

It’s not unusual for business leaders to rub shoulders with presidents and other elected officials. But this was something else: Inauguration seats closest to an incoming president tend to be reserved for a president’s family and figures in politics, and the tech executives on Trump’s dais have been hard at work ingratiating themselves into his universe. In the lead-up to today’s events, they have demonstrated a remarkable spinelessness. Most attempted to curry the incoming president’s favor by giving million-dollar donations to his inaugural fund—in effect, kissing the ring. They gave relatively little, if at all, to Joe Biden’s fund; some run companies that had previously declared they would reassess their political donations following the January 6 insurrection—a stance that clearly did not stick. The events of that day have been memory holed. Now Zuckerberg and Musk have reoriented their products in direct service of the MAGA movement, disposing of content-moderation policies and proclaiming a supposed commitment to free speech that serves the loudest and most odious users. TikTok exalted Trump yesterday when it brought its service back online following a brief shutdown: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” the app wrote in a pop-up sent to users. Fewer than five years ago, Trump had issued an executive order that would have effectively banned the app, calling it a threat to national security.

Regardless of past policies and stated principles, it seems that, as always, business is business. Each tech leader on Trump’s dais has a clear financial interest in courting the president. Meta, Google, and Apple all face antitrust suits; TikTok could still be shut down in the United States; and OpenAI, like other generative-AI firms, is doing whatever it can to avoid growth-limiting regulation. Musk’s companies have been under numerous recent investigations or reviews by federal regulators. Plus, he will need the support of the government to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” as Trump put it in his speech today.

The tech industry has officially placed itself in the palm of Trump’s hand. What will happen the next time the FBI wants to get into a Facebook account or an encrypted iPhone—when the definition of a political threat has changed based on the president’s whims? What will happen if Google Search delivers search results that are at odds with Trump’s agenda?

What cannot be forgotten is that these men—who for years have behaved as if they answer to no one—appear to stand for little more than the accrual of wealth and power, regardless of what it means for the people who use their products. Today, they bent the knee.

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TikTok is an AI app. Not an “ask a bot to do your homework” kind of AI app, but an AI app all the same: Its algorithm processes and acts upon huge amounts of data to keep users engaged. Without that fundamental, freakishly well-tuned technology, TikTok wouldn’t really be anything at all—just another video or shopping platform.

The app is set to be banned in the United States, following a decision by the Supreme Court earlier today. But the legacy of its algorithm will live on, as my colleague Hana Kiros wrote in an article for The Atlantic yesterday: “Although it was not the first app to offer an endless feed, and it was certainly not the first to use algorithms to better understand and target its users, TikTok put these ingredients together like nothing else before it.” The app was so effective—so sticky—that every meaningful competitor tried to copy its formula. Now TikTok-like feeds have been integrated into Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, X, even LinkedIn.

Today, AI is frequently conflated with generative AI because of the way ChatGPT has captured the world’s imagination. But generative AI is still a largely speculative endeavor. The most widespread and influential AI programs are the less flashy ones quietly whirring away in your pocket, influencing culture, business, and (in this case) matters of national security in very real ways.

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Internet Is TikTok Now

By Hana Kiros

There are times when, deep into a scroll through my phone, I tilt my head and realize that I’m not even sure what app I’m on. A video takes up my entire screen. If I slide my finger down, another appears. The feeling is disorienting, so I search for small design cues at the margins of my screen. The thing I’m staring at could be TikTok, or it could be one of any number of other social apps that look exactly like it.

Although it was not the first app to offer an endless feed, and it was certainly not the first to use algorithms to better understand and target its users, TikTok put these ingredients together like nothing else before it. It amassed what every app wants: many users who spend hours and hours scrolling, scrolling, scrolling (ideally past ads and products that they’ll buy). Every other major social platform—Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, X, even LinkedIn—has copied TikTok’s format in recent years. The app might get banned in the United States, but we’ll still be living in TikTok’s world.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

I’m scared of the person TikTok thinks I am: “TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is known for its accuracy and even its ‘magic,’” Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote for The Atlantic in 2021. “What does it mean if the videos it picks for you are totally disgusting?” Critics of the TikTok bill are missing the point: “America has a long history of shielding infrastructure and communication platforms from foreign control,” Zephyr Teachout wrote in March.

P.S.

Algorithmic feeds obviously have a profound effect on how people receive information today. That can be troubling in times of disaster and political strife. As Charlie Warzel wrote for The Atlantic yesterday, “The experience of logging on and consuming information through the algorithmic morass of our feeds has never felt more dispiriting, commoditized, chaotic, and unhelpful than it does right now.”

— Damon

Before Vine’s die-hard fans said goodbye, they wanted to reminisce. The short-form-video app, which shut down in 2017, created lots of viral moments (“And they were roommates …”) and propelled a number of internet creators into the mainstream. It was unlike anything else on the internet at the time: You can still sometimes see the refrain “RIP Vine” thrown around on social media. But for the most part, everybody has moved on. Two of Vine’s biggest stars, Logan Paul and Shawn Mendes, are still plenty famous.

I immediately thought of Vine this morning, when the Supreme Court upheld a law that requires TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company or face a ban in the United States. After I saw the news I then checked TikTok. The app was a hotbed of nostalgia, with many users reposting their earliest videos from several years ago. The ruling is the latest twist in the ongoing saga over the app’s fate: For more than four years, TikTok has been plagued by questions about its ties to the Chinese government. Unless there’s a last-minute intervention—still possible!—the app could conceivably shut off on Sunday. (After the Supreme Court’s decision, Joe Biden’s administration announced that it would leave enforcement of the ban to Donald Trump.)

[Read: The internet is TikTok now]

It’s a lot of fanfare and suspense over an app that, well, just isn’t all that important. There’s no denying TikTok has had a significant impact on American culture. Its kitschy trends, given names like “coastal grandmother,” influence the stores Americans shop at and the products they buy. Why were Stanley cups suddenly everywhere last year? Blame TikTok. Artists are encouraged to create music that might spark a dance challenge on the app. This is part of what TikTok does well: Its algorithm serves users ultra-personalized content, increasing engagement.

But though Americans might be listening to music or shopping for clothing that was made with TikTok in mind, a majority of them are not scrolling the app itself. According to a Pew survey released last year, only a third of U.S. adults said they had ever used TikTok. YouTube touches far more Americans, with 83 percent of adults reporting that they use the platform. Although TikTok is often referred to as the Gen Z app, a larger share of 18-to-29-year-olds are on Snapchat and Instagram.

To some degree, TikTok users seem at peace with knowing they have other options. Few people have flocked to Capitol Hill to protest the ban. For the most part, celebrities are not speaking out about just how dire the stakes of a TikTok blackout could be. Online, people are expressing their dismay with sardonic humor: tearfully saying goodbye to the hypothetical “Chinese spy” that’s supposedly been observing their TikTok behavior all these years. Millions have downloaded another Chinese app, Xiaohongshu, whose name translates to “little red book” in English.

[Read: It’s just an app]

TikTok would be the first major social-media platform to face an outright ban in the U.S., but its demise would not be so unfamiliar. Even apart from Vine, Millennials and Gen X users spent their youth on platforms that also one day just disappeared, or became otherwise unrecognizable. Tumblr went through a number of changes that gutted the once-thriving blogging platform. Users eventually find new homes elsewhere: Facebook overtook MySpace, only to cede its cultural cache to Instagram, and TikTok itself absorbed Musical.ly. It’s all part of the larger cycle of migration that has always defined social media. The same will likely be true with TikTok. So many social platforms have already cribbed from the app and feature similar algorithmic feeds that keep you scrolling. As Hana Kiros wrote yesterday, “The app might get banned in the United States, but we’ll still be living in TikTok’s world.”

This isn’t to say a TikTok ban wouldn’t be felt. Influencers with big TikTok followings will have to fight for attention on other platforms that may have different audiences and mechanisms for success. Small-business owners, in particular, may materially suffer. Restaurants are one viral video away from waking up to a line down the street, a designer just one hashtag off from selling out their new product. The app’s boon for businesses has been abetted by TikTok Shop, through which users can directly buy items featured in the videos on their feed. Those who went all in on TikTok will surely take a hit as they attempt to set up elsewhere online, but in all likelihood, they will recover.

When I opened TikTok this morning, many of the videos that users were reposting in farewell to the app featured trends I barely remembered from the early pandemic: Morning routines soundtracked by Powfu’s 2020 song “Death Bed,” and exaggerated lip-syncing to anime. Those videos are a testament to how quickly the internet moves on. In a few years, TikTok’s most defining moments, like Vine’s catchphrases and Tumblr’s main characters, will largely have been forgotten.

Twenty years ago, my day job was researching internet censorship, and my side hustle was advising activist organizations on internet security. I tried to help journalists in China access the unfiltered internet, and helped demonstrators in the Middle East avoid having their online content taken down.

Back then, unfiltered internet meant “the internet as accessed from the United States,” and most censorship-circumvention strategies focused on giving someone in a censored country access to a U.S. internet connection. The easiest way to keep sensitive content online—footage of a protest, for instance—was to upload it to a U.S.-based service such as YouTube. In early 2008, I gave a lecture for digital activists called “The Cute Cat Theory.” The theory was that U.S. platforms used for hosting pictures and videos of cat memes were the best tools for activists because if censorious governments blocked activist content, they would alienate their citizens by banning lots of innocuous content as well.

That was a simpler time. Elon Musk was a mere millionaire, only a few years removed from reportedly overstaying his U.S. student visa (he has denied working here illegally). Mark Zuckerberg was being mocked for wearing anonymous sweatshirts, not a $900,000 wristwatch. And the U.S. was seen as the home of the free, uncensored internet.

That era is now over. When Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20, videos of his oath of office will flood YouTube and Instagram. But those clips likely won’t circulate on TikTok, at least not any clips posted by U.S. users. In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill, the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, designed to force TikTok to sell the Chinese-owned app to a U.S. company or shut down operations in the U.S. by January 19, 2025. Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law. News outlets have reported that Trump is considering issuing an executive order to delay the ban, leading to speculation that Chinese officials might sell the platform to “first buddy” Musk. (Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, has dismissed such speculation.)

[Read: ‘I won’t touch Instagram’]

Whether or not that happens, this is a depressing moment for anyone who cherishes American protections for speech and access to information. In 1965, while the Cold War shaped the U.S. national-security environment, the Supreme Court, in Lamont v. Postmaster General, determined that the post office had to send people publications that the government claimed were “communist political propaganda,” rather than force recipients to first declare in writing that they wanted to receive this mail. The decision was unanimous, and established the idea that Americans had the right to discover whatever they wanted within “a marketplace of ideas.” As lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Center argued in an amicus brief supporting TikTok, the level of speech suppression that the U.S. government is demanding now is far more serious, because it would prevent American citizens from accessing information entirely, not just require them to get permission to access that information.

According to the Biden administration and its bipartisan supporters, TikTok is simply too dangerous for impressionable Americans to access. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar’s national-security argument in defense of the ban was that “ByteDance’s ownership and control of TikTok pose an unacceptable threat to national security because that relationship could permit a foreign adversary government to collect intelligence on and manipulate the content received by TikTok’s American users,” though she admitted that “those harms had not yet materialized.” The Supreme Court’s decision explicitly affirms these fears: “Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”

We don’t yet know how TikTok users in the United States will respond to the ban of a platform used by 170 million Americans, but what happened in India might provide some insights.

My lab at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst studies content on TikTok and YouTube, and a few months ago, we stumbled on some interesting data. In 2016, videos in Hindi represented less than 1 percent of all videos uploaded that year to YouTube. By 2022, more than 10 percent of new YouTube videos were in Hindi. We believe that this huge increase was due not just to broadband improvement and mobile-phone adoption in India, but to the Indian government’s ban of TikTok in June 2020. As we examined Hindi videos uploaded in 2020, we saw clear evidence of an influx of TikTok refugees onto YouTube. Many of the newly posted videos were exactly 15 seconds long, the limit that TikTok put on video recordings until 2017. Others featured TikTok branding at the beginning or end of the video.

Like the U.S., India had cited national-security reasons for the ban, and it had a more defensible justification: India and China were then clashing militarily along their shared border. But TikTok was much more important to India than it is to the United States. We estimate that, when India banned TikTok in mid-2020, more than 5 billion videos had been uploaded to the service by Indian users. (Examining some of these videos, we see evidence that TikTok in South Asia might be used more as a videochat service to stay in touch with family and friends than as a platform for wannabe influencers.) Even now, more than four years after the ban, the only countries with more videos uploaded to TikTok than India are Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United States; we estimate that more than a quarter of TikTok-video uploads are from South Asia, while just over 7 percent are from the United States.

When those Indian TikTok creators were forced off the platform, new Indian short-video apps such as Moj and Chingari hoped to capture the wave of users. They were largely unsuccessful—none of these small start-ups has achieved visibility in India to compete with YouTube and Instagram, both well-financed, U.S.-based businesses. In effect, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s TikTok ban was a subsidy to the U.S. companies Google and Meta. It was also correctly seen as evidence of the Modi government’s retreat from global democratic values and toward a less open society.

Until recently, I’d expected the TikTok ban to have the same result in the U.S.: effectively creating a nationalist subsidy protecting domestic tech providers (who, oddly enough, have been lining up to donate to inaugural parties for the incoming administration). But American TikTok users are a creative bunch, and in the past week, enough of them have migrated to the Chinese social network Xiaohongshu—often translated as “Red Book” or “Red Note” in English—that the app now tops social-media-download charts on Android and iPhone operating systems. Xiaohongshu, initially created as a video travel guide to Hong Kong for mainland-Chinese tourists, has an interface that’s familiar to TikTok users, and Chinese users are welcoming American newcomers with a charming stream of invitations to teach conversational Mandarin or Chinese cooking, and tips on how to avoid censorship on the network.

[Hana Kiros: The internet is TikTok now]

Chinese and American users aren’t likely to share space on Xiaohongshu for long. The Chinese government has generally required service providers whose tools become popular outside China to bifurcate their product offerings for Chinese and other users. Weixin, the popular messaging and microblogging app in China, is a separate platform—WeChat—in the rest of the world. TikTok itself branched off from the domestic-Chinese network Douyin. And even if Beijing, sensing a great PR opportunity, allows TikTok refugees to remain on Xiaohongshu, the same logic that allowed Congress to ban TikTok would presumably apply to any other Chinese-owned company with potential to “collect intelligence on and manipulate” American users’ content.

Although I don’t think this specific rebellion can last, I’m encouraged that American TikTok users realize that banning the popular platform directly contradicts America’s values. If only America’s leaders were so wise.

When I advised internet activists on how to avoid censorship in 2008, I included a section in my presentation called “The China Corollary.” Although most nations could not easily censor social-media platforms without antagonizing their citizens, China was big enough to create its own parallel social-media system that met the needs of most users for entertainment while blocking activists. What I could not have anticipated was that Americans would find themselves fleeing their own censorious government for a Chinese video platform with tight content controls.

Trump might decide to get around the TikTok ban with an executive order stating that the platform is no longer a national-security threat. Or the Trump administration could elect not to enforce the law. Musk, Zuckerberg, or another Trump friend might purchase the platform. But for millions of Americans, the damage is done: The idea of America as a champion of free speech is forever shattered by this shameful ban.

The internet, a friend of mine once argued to me, is like a sprawling city: Everyone knows there are neighborhoods you shouldn’t wander into, but it would be wrong to prohibit people from entering them.

The problem with my friend’s view is that whereas one has to go looking for bad neighborhoods, the internet’s dangers—specifically and most perniciously, pornography—come looking for you, even if you happen to be a child. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that dummy accounts that specified their age as 13 were regularly served up soft porn by Instagram’s algorithms. Upon the accounts’ creation, Instagram began showing the imaginary users “moderately racy” content, such as women dancing seductively or dressed provocatively. Once these accounts lingered on such videos, Instagram began introducing more graphic videos and posts. “Adult sex-content creators began appearing in the feeds in as little as three minutes,” the Journal reported. “After less than 20 minutes watching Reels, the test accounts’ feeds were dominated by promotions for such creators, some offering to send nude photos to users who engaged with their posts.”

In fact, porn is so ubiquitous online that it’s tempting to dismiss the preponderance of porn available to children as mainly harmless in most cases—a rite of passage for kids growing up on the internet. But childhood exposure to porn is a public-health concern with serious, long-term ramifications for children. Their interests are essentially collateral damage in adults’ right to consume porn as they please, and a massive industry’s interest in preserving its billions of dollars a year in revenue.

[Read: The age of AI child abuse is here]

Some websites take greater care than Instagram or X in preventing minors from accessing sexual content, and recent legislation across the South has begun requiring age verification before a user can browse sites such as Pornhub. But whatever safeguards are in place to protect minors online, they don’t seem to be working. A 2023 report by Common Sense Media found that the average age of first pornography exposure in American children is 12, and another 2023 survey conducted for the Children’s Commissioner for England revealed that a quarter of British youths ages 16 to 21 had been exposed to porn for the first time in primary school. An Australian survey last year, meanwhile, placed the average age of first pornography exposure at a little over 13. Just more than half of the American minors surveyed said that they had encountered porn accidentally; 38 percent of the British young people surveyed reported the same. If safeguards are in place to protect children from coming into contact with porn, they appear laughable.

Childhood experiences with pornography can be distressing for children and can negatively affect their sexual development. Research presented at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychology Association in 2017 found that the earlier a man’s first exposure to porn was, the more likely he was to desire power over women, suggesting that contact with porn at an early age may contort a child’s sexual development. One 12-year-old interviewed for the British survey said that her boyfriend had strangled her during their first kiss—part of a trend teenagers I interviewed in 2021 also brought up. A Taiwanese longitudinal study of youths further found that early porn exposure predicted an earlier sexual debut and participation in unsafe sex. A third of respondents in the Australian study indicated that they relied on porn for information about sex, a concerning substitute for proper education—the sort provided by people who know and care for children, not by people attempting to sell them sex. Along with these specific risks, children are also subject to all of the usual problems cited with the adult use of porn: internalizing unrealistic standards for sex, developing excessive consumption habits, becoming desensitized to sexual violence. The main difference is that when porn use begins in childhood, it steps in to miseducate desires that have yet to fully form.

Proponents of porn use generally crusade under the banner of free speech—the Free Speech Coalition, an organization currently fighting a Texas law that would require porn sites to collect proof that users are over 18, is a porn-industry lobbying group. On Wednesday, the FSC argued against the state of Texas over these age-verification laws before the Supreme Court, claiming that these laws abrogate the exercise of free speech. (Pornhub, along with other major porn distributors, has already withdrawn operations from several southern states with age-verification laws on the books.) Even an FSC attorney admitted at the Supreme Court that the organization recognizes the government’s compelling interest in preventing porn from reaching minors.

My friend who analogized the internet to a city with good and bad neighborhoods perhaps failed to consider that the people traversing those streets are in many cases children, and in our society, children’s issues are especially fraught—see recent conflicts about which books should be available to children in their school libraries, and about whether children should be allowed to change their identity at school or their body. All of these debates really are, as the scholar Rita Koganzon wrote in a Yale Law Journal article published last year, “part of an ongoing culture war between factions of adults.” It’s unfortunate that arguments over how to protect children from exposure to porn are very likely to be proxy battles between adults’ differing views on whether porn is good, bad, or neutral—each debate deserves to play out separately, without the interests of children being made subordinate to the interests of adults. The risks associated with childhood porn exposure are real, and worthy of society’s special attention.