The Why’s of TikTok
I saw the headlines about the TikTok deal on Thursday and didn’t rush to say anything. I wanted to see what survived the weekend—what was signal and what was noise. After sitting with it, the only honest way to read this is through two different “whys.” There’s the reason the deal exists in the first place, and the reason it’s being sold in public. Neither one is satisfied by what’s on the table.
The first why is the real one: power. Turn a ban threat into leverage. Assert control over a system that reaches tens of millions of Americans every day. Create a mechanism you can pull when it counts—access to data, influence over distribution, pressure on owners and operators who live outside your jurisdiction. The goal isn’t a press release; it’s leverage you can use, clarity when you use it, and outcomes you can actually enforce.
The second why is the voter-facing one: safety. Protect Americans’ data. “Fix” anxiety around a foreign-owned platform without ripping a beloved product out of people’s hands. Keep the app, make it safe, move on. The promise is that custody and compliance will lead to different results on the screen.
In practice, it’s the difference between a system that maximizes watch time and one that rewards comprehension. The first pushes clips that keep you scrolling. The second would give distribution to pieces that leave you more correct. Ownership can move; if that objective doesn’t, outcomes don’t.
This structure doesn’t deliver either why.
It doesn’t deliver the first why because leverage without clarity isn’t power. You can re-paper ownership and appoint new stewards, but unless the United States can clearly dictate who touches which data, who changes which models, who sets and audits the ranking parameters, and who can stop a bad release in real time, you’ve added ceremony, not control. The point of leverage is not to tell a story about authority; it’s to possess it. If economic participation remains upstream, if operational boundaries blur across entities, and if the decisive levers are still governed by the same incentives, the state has acquired a photo op, not a handle.
And it doesn’t deliver the second why because safety without incentive change is a promise, not an outcome. You can localize infrastructure, appoint auditors, and tighten contracts, but the product will continue to behave according to the objective it is paid to maximize. Today that objective is attention—watch time, speed, return frequency. That objective is extraordinarily good at making short videos travel fast and feel indispensable. It is not designed to privilege provenance, context, or comprehension. If you want different civic outcomes, brand outcomes, or creator outcomes, you have to change what the system optimizes for. That is product work, not paperwork.
There’s a secondary cost here that doesn’t show up in the victory laps. A U.S. carve-out introduces drag. Features ship on different timelines, tools fall out of sync, and culture splits at the edges. Creators and advertisers pay that tax first; users feel it as an “almost the same” product. That is cost, not reform.
We will, of course, get louder trust language. Decks will improve. Audit references will multiply. None of that is meaningless—transparency and custody matter—but none of it is the thing that governs outputs. The feed isn’t guided by descriptions of what it should be; it’s guided by what it’s paid to maximize. The system learns from the objective and teaches the supply and the demand which behaviors pay. Keep that target fixed and you keep getting the outcomes the system was built to produce. That’s not an indictment of TikTok; it’s a description of how any high-velocity feed behaves when it’s doing its job well.
If you wanted to satisfy the real why, you’d draw a clean, enforceable boundary around the decisive levers: data access, model weights, ranking parameters, and release governance. You’d make that boundary auditable on demand and give someone domestic the authority to halt changes when thresholds are crossed, with consequences that don’t require a news cycle to trigger. You’d also either sever upstream economic claims or disclose and limit them so power isn’t leaking back through the financial plumbing.
If you wanted to satisfy the voter why, you’d ask the product to do something different on purpose. You’d add comprehension and authority to the ranking goal instead of treating them as labels after the fact. You’d make provenance a property of the content itself—transcripts and citations that survive stitches and remixes—so credibility is portable, not an aesthetic. You’d treat context as an advantage, not a warning, and give distribution credit to updates and corrections so being right is a visible, rewarded act. You’d make the feed sensitive to mode and intent, because a late-night scroll should not be treated like a morning brief.
None of that insults the product we have. TikTok is excellent at what it was built to do. The creators who thrive there read the terrain better than most media companies ever have. But a deal that moves signatures without touching incentives doesn’t satisfy either of the reasons we were told it was necessary. It doesn’t give the state the leverage it thinks it bought, and it doesn’t give users the safety they think they were promised. It gives both sides a story and leaves the machine alone.
That’s the part I waited to say. The scoreboard here isn’t the cap table. It’s the objective. Until that changes—or until control over it is unambiguous—neither why is actually met.