TikTok is hugely influential, and the younger people they're trying to influence don't read newspapers and don't hang out on X or Instagram (both of which also censor certain political content).
If you introduce friction with something that millions or more use, a few % peeling off or missing things means tens of thousands of people are impacted. And tiktok has a hell of a lot more than a million users.
I still don’t get what you’re trying to say or why you’re downplaying this.
The question isn't whether they've been successful in hiding information. It's whether their goal is to hide information (or I would say, to control the narrative), which it clearly is.
This is why the administration has gone out of its way to try to get Kimmel and Colbert off the air, why it has commandeered CBS and tried to kill 60 minutes pieces critical of the administration, why it violated the law in order to keep TikTok (already fervently pro-Trump) up and running, and why allies of the administration have been put in charge of TikTok after the transition. It's why Bezos is slowly strangling the Washington Post, why Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing the same to the LA Times, and why the administration is putting their thumb on the scale for Paramount, rather than Netflix, to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (which owns CNN). It's why Musk bought Twitter. It's why they blatantly lie in their press conferences and statements to the media about how the ICE killings happened.
If you walked into a Turning-Point USA meeting in a high school, do you think the kids attending that meeting could accurately tell you what ICE has been doing? I don't.
Amazing to me how many of the issues that influenced swing voters in the past three presidential elections were nothing more than right-wing fever dreams.
No doubt the distraction from the Epstein files is a contributing factor, but it’s a mistake to think he won’t do incredibly harmful things simply because they seem insane and without purpose to us, who grew up post World War II.
His decision tree is like
Does it make me feel like a tough guy? -> Is there some way I can leverage it for grift and personal gain? -> Does it make my political enemies and undesirables feel angry and helpless? -> Is it a decision I can make unilaterally? -> Then YES
It really is. We’ve put children with emotional problems in charge of the U.S. military and economy. Shameful and heartbreaking. I hope we can recover and rebuild alliances but I think that will be a multigenerational task.
The Secretary of Defense is a loyalist and will likely put people in charge of the operation who are on board with the mission to suppress protest.
There's also just the chaos angle. From the same New Yorker article I linked elsewhere in this thread, I thought this anecdote was nuts:
> In Los Angeles, for example, [in 1992] there was a situation where marines were accompanying police to a house where there was a domestic disturbance and the police officers said to “cover me” as they went into the house. “Cover” means something very different in the Marines, and they opened fire on the house. It was only by good fortune that no one was killed.
The people in charge of any such operation would be unit commanders, military officers, who have greater legal restrictions on their conduct than either the President or the SECWAR. Regardless of the orders upon them military commanders are obligated to follow the law and are provided legal representatives for clarity.
I'm hopeful that'll be the case. But can SECDEF (it's still called the Department of Defense, regardless of stationery changes) hand-pick the unit commanders and military officers?
> The other point that I want to make is that if the military were being deployed to try to bring ice under control, that would be one thing. That’s not the purpose. The purpose of deploying the military here would be to enable the violence and lawlessness that we’re seeing from ice. And so even if the military itself is not engaging in these kinds of destructive actions, it is there to insure that ice is able to do so. It would serve in that way as a force amplifier for ice.
And then a more optimistic take in which Jamelle Bouie talks about how difficult it would be for Trump to disrupt upcoming elections in any meaningful way:
I've been amazed that US CEOs haven't pushed back harder on the administration due to the threat of the rest of the world leaving US services like these.
I know the goverment has a lot of power over even the largest companies, but these companies also have power, and moving into a world in which AWS, Apple, Microsoft, and Google can only operate in the US, and maybe with the Saudis, isn't going to be good for shareholders.
They bent a knee to this administration so fast. I'm curious to see if there will be an equally fast pivot in the other direction when Trump starts showing holes in his armor. There will come a time when corporate greed no longer points in the direction of Trumpism.
I'm asking this in good faith, but what can they do? The Trump administration is absolutely salivating for armed pushback. I think the best they can logistically do is refuse to help ICE (as local police are doing in some cities).
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1i9zf5u/rco...
https://arxiv.org/html/2508.13375v1