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On Monday, Shou Zi Chew stood atop the dais watching as Donald Trump was sworn into office as president for the second time. It would be a monumental moment for the Singaporean TikTok CEO if it weren’t so utterly bizarre.
In recent days, in order to save the social media app he runs, Chew has had to fully prostrate himself at Trump’s feet, rising only to kiss the once and future president’s ring.
“On behalf of everyone at TikTok and all our users across the country, I want to thank President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” Chew said in a video posted to TikTok on Friday after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a law banning TikTok unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divests. “This is a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship.”
Chew is right that TikTok being banned is due to arbitrary censorship and that this law is an affront to the First Amendment rights of its 170 million users in the United States. But praising Trump’s action is more akin to performance art than traditional lobbying.
It was Trump, after all, who initiated the first effort to ban TikTok in 2020, citing national security concerns over Chinese data collection and influence operations. That said, it was possibly sparked by an embarrassing incident that June where TikTok users coordinated to buy up tickets at a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, causing his campaign team to vastly overestimate attendance.
That August, Trump issued an executive order invoking his emergency economic powers to force mobile app stores and internet service providers to cut off access to TikTok due to vague concerns about national security. Multiple federal judges halted the law, finding that the executive order likely exceeded Trump’s statutory authority. Trump also tried to force ByteDance to sell the app to an American company—maybe Microsoft, maybe Walmart, maybe Oracle, the latter of which got a massive cloud deal to store TikTok’s U.S. user data, which continues to this day, but ultimately Trump did not act to secure a deal before his first term ended in January 2021.
The effort to ban TikTok picked up in 2024 when a bipartisan group of legislators passed a law effectively accomplishing the same thing that Trump attempted in his executive order citing similar national security concerns—albeit with more legal heft since Trump had limited authority to ban TikTok unilaterally. Former President Joe Biden signed the bill into law in April and TikTok took the government to court, an ordeal that concluded on Friday with the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the law.
But in this time, Trump changed his mind about TikTok—perhaps because one of his top donors, Jeffrey Yass, is a major TikTok investor, perhaps because he thought TikTok’s users helped him win the election in November, or perhaps because he wanted to be viewed as a savior.
In the final days of his administration, Biden seemed to get cold feet about banning the popular social media app, reportedly promising he would not enforce the ban. But without an explicit statement on that front, TikTok went dark for less than 24 hours—partially out of legitimate concern for the uncertainty of the law, but also seemingly as a publicity stunt—setting up Trump to be the savior he desired.
Kissing Trump’s ring, it turns out, is easy business for a social media CEO with everything on the line.
At the inauguration, Chew stood near Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the man who once lobbied Trump to ban TikTok. Chew doesn’t have the luxury that Zuckerberg has. Meta is the all-American social media company and TikTok faces an eternal uphill battle to convince Washington that it’s not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. But Chew has eyes and can see that even in so-called free speech havens such as America, the lords of media and tech in Trump’s age are expected to bow and kiss the ring.
After all, is that not what Zuckerberg has done by removing fact-checkers and relaxing its content rules to allow more hate speech? In the next four years, users can expect that their favorite social media companies kowtow to Trump with fawning messages and actions favorable to right-wing edgelords. Let he who is without stomach-turning sycophancy cast the first stone.
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