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As Washington DC winds down from an unprecedented period of high security for President Trump’s inauguration on January 20, the U.S. has also lowered a barricade of a digital kind: the TikTok ban that was scheduled to come into force on January 19. President Trump passed an executive order staying the ban, and now both Washington DC and Beijing are looking at a sale of the platform to US buyers. Does this mark a reversal of the US’s policies on foreign-owned platforms? What will platform regulation look like for the next four years?
Your censorship, or mine?
Trump 2.0 will be operating in a social media landscape that has, fatalistically, arced toward many of Trump 1.0’s policy stances.
On 28 May 2020, the White House released an Executive Order (EO) on Preventing Online Censorship, alleging US platforms’ abuse of immunities afforded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The EO, later revoked by the Biden Administration, was, in part, a response to X (formerly known as Twitter) adding a fact-check note to President Trump’s claims about fraudulent mail-in ballots.

Image: President Trump tweets in response to Twitter Fact Check
X has since abandoned its labelling programme in favour of crowd-sourced, consensus-based Community Notes. On 7 January 2025, Meta Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg followed suit, and announced an end to the company’s fact-checking programme, also moving to a Community Notes model. The effectiveness of the Community Notes model remains debatable and politically charged in its own right.
On 6 August 2020, the Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok threatened to impose sanctions on ByteDance, unless it sold TikTok to a US company. This EO was struck down by federal courts in response to two lawsuits. In March 2024, the US Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The Foreign Adversary Applications Act prohibits the hosting, distribution, or maintenance of “foreign adversary-controlled applications”. The Act includes an exemption for “qualified divestitures”. The Act, unlike the Trump EO, has been upheld by federal courts. While the Act specifically singles out ByteDance in its introduction, the text itself can be broadly interpreted to apply to any foreign-owned and regulated content-sharing app with more than a million monthly active users. Millions of Americans, anticipating the TikTok ban, flocked to Xiaohongshu, a mix between Pinterest and Instagram. While they pushed it to the top of app charts in the country, its popularity has qualified it for scrutiny under the Foreign Adversary Applications Act.
What’s next?
Setting aside the merits or demerits of the Trump 1.0 approach to social media platforms, it is important to state at the outset that, even if policy imperatives have been building over time, the final direction that the White House directives take will likely be personal.
On TikTok, President Trump has opted to pursue an “Art of the Deal” approach, delaying the ban but pushing for divestiture.U The USS news outlets report that various bids have been made to purchase the app, including a US$20 billion bid from Shark Tank cast member Kevin O’Leary, and a potential deal that could result in a second social media platform coming under Elon Musk’s ownership. On US-based platforms, Meta’s about-turn on content moderation and Musk’s courtship of Trump indicates that social media platforms will play it safe, lest they run afoul of the new administration. There are already
anecdotal reports of censorship on the temporarily-restored Tik Tok, in line with the new administration’s stances on social and political issues.
We can also turn to President Trump’s picks for key agencies as a signal. The Federal Trade Commission, which under Commissioner Lina Khan, has steadily applied pressure on Big Tech companies on issues related to non-transparent, anti-competitive practices, will likely shift to a lighter “cop on the beat” role under incoming Commissioner Andrew Ferguson. Ferguson is a traditional Republican, leaning libertarian. He is critical of the concentration of power in a handful of platforms, or the “Silicon Valley political consensus”, as he calls it. He is also an ardent free-speech absolutist. He stated in an interview that, “There’s a long history of government working with large businesses to accomplish shared objectives, even if the shared objectives are not consistent with individual liberty.” Ferguson is likely to seek coherence in the application of antitrust standards, ceding rulemaking to Congress.[1] Parts of the FTC’s agenda are likely to survive the leadership change— for instance, revisions to the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rules requiring verifiable parental consent for children’s use of online platforms.
Back to where we started
As always, social media platforms’ policy changes and a new US administration will have consequences far beyond the US’s shores. First, they will directly challenge national and regional laws and rules in some of their largest markets: Brazil’s attorney general, for instance, has stated that Meta’s new policies will be at odds with the country’s hate speech laws, and its Minister for Communications said the new rules “violate fundamental rights and national sovereignty, promoting a digital Wild West”. The European Union (EU) was singled out as well for “promoting censorship”—a charge the European Commission has firmly denied.
Second, the divestment requirements of the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act will simply displace one problem (apps controlled by and subject to speech restrictions of adversary nations) and magnify another (the concentration of power in the hands of a few platforms, primarily headquartered in the US). For governments that have criticised this concentration of power, the sale of Chinese apps to another great power is not a tenable solution. For the US, where users are increasingly wary of what they allege is homegrown censorship, widespread bans are unlikely to yield lasting public support. Instead, reforms like consistent platform rules that are not subject to the whims of their CEOs, as well as stronger user privacy requirements would be more effective.
How Trump 2.0 tackles open questions on platform regulation will not just be a domestic issue, and as with Trump 1.0, governments should brace for turbulence.
Trisha Ray is a Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.
[1] Ferguson, notably, stated in a December 13, 2024 dissenting note: “It is senseless for the Biden-Harris FTC to announce, on its way out the door, its plans for the future. It has no future… The Commission under President Trump will…vigorously and faithfully enforce the laws that Congress has passed, rather than writing them.”
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/ferguson-dissent-2024-annual-regulatory-plan-agenda.pdf
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