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The Best Buyer for TikTok River Page

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Will America be better off if an American owns TikTok? (Illustration by The Free Press, photos via Getty Images)

TikTok could be “harming vulnerable Americans” or exposing our democracy to “covert foreign influence.” So say supporters of the bill President Biden signed yesterday, which requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the social media app to an American buyer within the next nine months, or else face a ban. The federal court blocked Trump’s attempt to ban the app in 2020, and TikTok has promised it will challenge this new law as well. But in case the Democrats have more luck, it’s worth asking: Who will buy TikTok? 

And: Would any of them actually use this great power for the good of America?

Last month, Donald Trump’s treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin said he was assembling a team to buy the beleaguered app, but this doesn’t seem like a great outcome for Biden. A prominent Republican owning one of the country’s most popular social media apps might not be great for the Democrats’ election chances. Also, Mr. Mnuchin was an executive producer for Suicide Squad. Does that sound like a man you can trust to make quality video content? (Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary has also expressed interest in buying TikTok, but he is Canadian. Moving on.) 

Back in 2020, during Trump’s campaign against TikTok, the multinational tech conglomerate Oracle formed an alliance with Walmart that attempted to buy the app before its owner prevailed in court. They might resurrect the alliance, but again, this isn’t an ideal outcome for America. Around 70–80 percent of Walmart products are made in China. Biden could be forcing TikTok into the hands of a company whose entire business model relies on access to the Chinese labor market. Not great in terms of “covert foreign influence.” There’s also a possibility that the entire app just becomes an ad for Walmart. Would Target be shadowbanned?

Oracle, meanwhile, was accused in 2022 of using a “surveillance machine” to gather—and sell—the personal data of five billion people. That’s five times the number of people on TikTok.

The CEO of video-game giant Activision has also expressed interest. As the makers of games like World of Warcraft, they are probably the only company who could make TikTok more addictive, which would be great for shareholders, but possibly grind our civilization to a halt. I don’t love that idea, nor do I love the idea of Microsoft buying TikTok, something they have tried and failed to do before. Seems like a long con to force us to use Bing, and I, for one, won’t stand for it. 

So, who should buy TikTok? To my mind, there is only one answer: the Kardashian Clan, a coven of Armenian witches (plus Caitlyn Jenner) who have kept America under their spell since the George W. Bush administration. Nobody understands social media better. The aesthetics would be immaculate, the product placements profitable, and the politics confusing. Worried about the woke left or the far right taking over social media and censoring people? A Republican transgender lesbian who doesn’t support gay marriage will be on the board, covering all of the bases in a way that infuriates everyone on every side equally. That’s what this country deserves, and needs. KTok now, KTok forever. 

River Page is a writer on tech and culture. Follow him on X @river_is_nice.

For more on this subject, read Jonathan Haidt’s essay, “Smartphones Rewired Childhood. Here’s How to Fix It.” And for more sharp takes on technology, subscribe to The Free Press:

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It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump Joe Nocera

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Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican president, Donald J. Trump.

The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.


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Stop Making Cents? Charles Lane

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On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?

Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?

Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.

Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.

“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.

Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.

What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.

They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.

Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.

So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.


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Nellie Bowles: The Triumph of the Plastic Straw Nellie Bowles

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The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.

States and cities passed laws against them. California banned them from restaurants outright in 2018. New York, in 2021, changed the law so the only straws on display were paper (you were allowed to ask for plastic). Official fact sheets from Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida instruct Floridians to “Skip the Straw,” citing the 500 million figure. Did anyone question the basis of this?


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