They warned us about Chinese intelligence, about shadowy ministries nudging dance trends and beauty tips into obedience, about teenagers unknowingly practicing soft diplomacy between lip-syncs. TikTok, we were told, was a digital Trojan horse, cute on the outside, full of listening devices within. Now the horse is being repainted, not red with communist stars, but red with baseball caps and campaign slogans, and we are supposed to believe this is liberation rather than a simple change of costume.
Control, after all, is not a nationality. It is a habit. The original fear was easy to dramatize. Somewhere in Beijing, a bureaucrat in a gray suit decides that breakup songs should feel slightly more patriotic, that protest footage should buffer just long enough to bore the viewer into scrolling away. The story had a satisfying Cold War aroma, complete with invisible wires and inscrutable villains. But the quieter possibility that the same machinery could be operated enthusiastically, even proudly, by Americans who consider themselves freedom’s last defenders, felt impolite to raise. Unpatriotic, even.
Now comes the MAGA version of the platform, draped in the language of rescue. “Free speech,” it will say, the way a bouncer says “relax” while tightening his grip on your collar. “No more censorship,” it will promise, while rearranging the furniture so that only certain conversations are easy to reach. This is not a conspiracy so much as a business model. Platforms do not need secret police. They need incentives, a few favored narratives, and an audience trained to confuse amplification with truth.
We have already seen the pilot episode. Twitter’s transformation into X was marketed as a heroic jailbreak: the bird liberated from its cage, the town square returned to the people. What followed was less a renaissance than a demolition followed by selective rebuilding. Moderation, once boring and bureaucratic, became suspect, elitist, vaguely treasonous. In its place came “engagement,” a word that sounds like a promise ring and behaves like a casino. The loudest voices discovered they were no longer shouting into the void but into a well-lit auditorium, complete with complimentary microphones.
None of this required a single law to be passed or a single editor to be arrested. The genius of modern manipulation is its politeness. It does not ban; it boosts. It does not silence; it surrounds. You are free to speak, of course. You are simply less likely to be heard if your words do not harmonize with the house key.
A MAGA-owned TikTok would not need to tell creators what to say. It would only need to teach them, gently, what works. Videos skeptical of election conspiracies might still exist, the way pay phones still exist, technically available, emotionally extinct. Clips that flatter the preferred worldview would discover the small miracle of virality. The algorithm, like a kindly teacher, would offer extra credit to those who learned quickly.
And the audience? The audience would insist nothing has changed. They would point to the millions of videos still online, the endless scroll the apparent chaos. Control, in the twenty-first century, is best disguised as abundance. When everything is allowed, only some things are rewarded.
There is a particular irony in watching American politicians decry foreign propaganda while constructing domestic versions with better branding. The fear was never really about data centers in Shanghai. It was about who gets to write the invisible syllabus of daily life: which jokes circulate, which outrages ripen, which faces become familiar enough to feel trustworthy. We objected to the possibility that someone else was editing our collective subconscious. We did not object to the editing.
Elon Musk’s road from Twitter to X was not a coup; it was a seminar. It taught us that ownership is destiny, that a platform’s values are not etched into its terms of service but into the temperament of whoever signs the checks. He did not need to dictate ideology. He needed only to rearrange the weather. Storms appeared where there had been drizzle; droughts where there had been steady rain.
To call this manipulation feels melodramatic, like accusing a mirror of lying. But mirrors choose their angles. They choose their lighting. They decide which blemishes deserve close-ups and which can be blurred into softness. A social network is a mirror that remembers what made you stare last time and offers it again, slightly louder.
So we may soon live in a world where the same officials who once trembled at the thought of Chinese engineers tuning American attention will applaud American businessmen for doing it more loudly. The accent will change. The method will not.
Control is not a dragon to be slain; it is a chair that someone is always sitting in. The question is never whether the chair exists. It is only whose fingerprints are on the armrests, and whether we have been trained to call the pressure on our shoulders “freedom.”
No comments:
Post a Comment