Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin recently revealed his interest in acquiring TikTok should its parent company, ByteDance, be forced to sell as a result of Congressional action. Mnuchin’s desire to have the federal government seize someone else’s company on his behalf is much akin to a child feeling entitled to someone else’s toy — but should be taken with great alarm by those who rely on the app for entertainment or income.
To understand why, let’s take a look at how the current political hack running a social media company is doing.
This past week, Truth Social debuted as a publicly traded company led by its CEO, former dairy farmer-turned-Congressman Devin Nunes. Currently, its share price is down roughly 33 percent since being listed, which may have something to do with the fact that the company lost nearly $60 million dollars last year, its monthly active user base is down 39% over that same period, and its backend computer code was actually ripped off from another, obscure, social media company.
Let’s be real. With the exception of a few die-hards, the only reason anyone knows when Donald Trump posts his “Truths” is because they read about it on platforms they actually care about.
This isn’t just to beat up on Nunes. But it is very much to obliterate the notion that any old politician or government official is capable of replicating the genius found in major social media companies.
If Nunes was capable of building the next TikTok, he would have never ran for Congress in the first place.
If Mnuchin could develop an algorithm to better engage users and reward content creators — what’s stopping him, a man with extraordinary means, from doing so?
The reality of course is he can’t, so he obnoxiously demands someone else hands over their technology instead.
All of this is to say, if the government gets involved in picking who should run TikTok, one can only expect the app to decline. And this decline will come at the expense of many creators and businesses' entire livelihoods.
It’s infinitely perplexing that Speaker Johnson chose to bring the House TikTok ban up for a vote right in an election year. As the flood of complaints to Capitol Hill that subsequently ensued reveals — killing TikTok is political poison. For either party.
House Republicans have now afforded Chuck Schumer the opportunity to be the hero for hundreds of millions of American TikTok users by simply never bringing a bill up for a Senate vote.
And sincerely, very much to his credit, Donald Trump came out against the House bill before the vote.
If anyone should know that replicating the ingenuity of TikTok is not easy — it should be him.
