The sequence of events as far as I can recall:
- Trump promised to ban TikTok
- TikTok was slated to be “banned” in the twilight of Biden’s term
- Trump says he’d give it 90 days to make a decision
- Biden decides not to ban it, handing it off to Trump
- TikTok goes dark
- It returns, but if you search for something anti-Trump in the United States, you can’t find it
- Using a VPN will give you that content
- Various news outlets are now calling it Trump’s “Propaganda Arm”
What the fuck is going on? From a political or technological standpoint.
He had to defend TikTok to win over youth votes for the election.
Now that he’s pres again, he knows that in one year it will become very apparent that he can’t lower grocery/gas prices, and isn’t willing to take action on home prices, the deficit, AI, or wage inequality.
So instead he has a list of things that will prop up his approval rating, because that is the only metric that actually matters to him. Right now that seems to mean keeping TikTok, and annexing new territory (even if that just means renaming the Gulf of Mexico).