Comrades, we are entering into a new stage of the American Empire. There is no doubt that fascism has won over liberalism, and the contradictions of capital will grow ever sharper. In the past few days I have seen a deluge of posts outside this space, across TikTok and other social media, laying this vague claim that “Something is wrong with TikTok”. Even here, I’ve seen two highly upvoted threads swallowing this liberal narrative by the hook. Let me be clear, this notion that the ushering in of fascism flying the banner of Donald Trump, has somehow, over a 12-hour period, turned TikTok into TruthTok, is pure liberal hallucination.

Liberals are finally waking from their 4-year-long political coma. They have mourned the loss of their coconut queen and did nothing to steel themselves against the incoming reality that is a second term of Donald John Trump. Long before they began mourning, while they were still in their deep slumber, their liberal bubble, their KHive, was eroding from underneath their feet. In a moment of pure drama, TikTok went dark, only to be resurrected by the man they hate the most. When it emerged from its grave, and thanked the McLich King for his dark gift, liberals bullshit detectors were sounding at full alarm. The problem with the liberal bullshit detector, however, is that it belongs to a liberal, unable to identify fantasy from reality. As they returned to TikTok, the stench of Trump’s dark business tainted their senses, and they began to hallucinate from the fumes. These hallucinations culminated in the list below, which I’m sure you’ve seen:

Much of this list falls into a few categories: False, True but long-standing, or Unverifiable.

Donald Trump (Negative remarks removed), this is a transposition of this claim: “Tiktok censoring searches disfavorable of Donald Trump”, which is an extension of this claim: “You cannot search Donald Trump Rigged Election”, which is patently false.

If you were to open TikTok and search for “Rigged Election” and any other combination of terms, you will get nothing back. Combating misinformation on social media platforms has its roots in the 2016 elections. If you remember, Hillary Clinton and liberals at large blamed Russian Troll Farms and other forms of Russian backed disinformation campaigns, as well as direct collaboration with the Trump campaign, for losing the election. Even in 2016, the liberal bullshit detector was out in full force. We’ve long combatted this tendency from them, both with H. Clinton and with Harris, by pointing out just how flawed these two people were, and just how incompetently their campaigns were run.

From the Russiagate fallout grew a self-imposed practice of fact checking across many social media platforms. In 2016, Facebook (having been embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal) began its fact checking in partnership with the AP. In 2019, YouTube began to provide fact checking on its platform, after misinformation campaigns, spread via WhatsApp in India turned deadly, hoping to avoid a similar situation on their platform. TikTok has its own Misinformation Policy, which mentions election misinformation several times, and one would think it would be enough for a burgeoning media platform to emulate the policies of its cohorts.

As we all know, in 2020, election misinformation only became of even higher focus. TikTok, like every other social media company, is doing the bare minimum in combating election misinformation, and likely has always been. This isn’t something that has been implemented overnight, and as we’ll see, the political nature of TikTok is something that has been changing for a very long time.

Many liberals, and even some leftists, claim that content about Palestine is being suppressed as of the 12-hour blackout. We had a thread here just yesterday that said comments of “Free Palestine!” were being removed. I’ve since tested that, as a US user of TikTok, and have yet to have that comment removed. In fact, the video I posted the comment on was from the Daily Mail. Except, that doesn’t mean that this isn’t happening. You have to remember, liberals have been sleeping for 4 years. They are only now learning that TikTok has been taking deliberate actions to combat “antisemitic” behavior on their platform.

In 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order that was a failed attempt to get TikTok to divest its business dealings from ByteDance. His primary motivation was centered around right-wing censorship broadly. This was in the lead up to the 2020 Olympics, and conversation about Trans Athletes was bubbling up within the alternative media space. While his attempt to blacklist the app failed, it did succeed in other ways. One of those ways was the transition of TikTok operations and data warehousing onto American soil, named “Project Texas”. This project was a lot more than simply moving the data from wherever it was, to the US.

Project Texas coincided with a hiring spree for domestic TikTok operations. MintPress shows that this action taken by Trump led to not only the rehousing of TikTok’s data, but a staffing boom that consisted of many state aligned individuals with a history working at places like Albright Stonebridge Group, NATO Association of Canada, SecDev Foundation, and even NATO itself, some who specialized in “phycological operations”. The net result, as the article points out early on, is that:

TikTok itself has taken steps to align itself with U.S. government policy, deleting more than 320,000 Russian accounts and removing at least 41,000 videos peddling misinformation about the war. In addition to this, it has placed warning labels marked “Russia state-controlled media” on 49 accounts linked to the Russian government. Like other big social media platforms, it has not done the same to Western state-owned outlets such as the BBC, RTÉ, or the CBC.

Near the tail end of last year, Alan Macleod, the author of the MintPress article I cited, has another outlining TikTok’s efforts to align with the state on Gaza as well. These are part of a three part series covering the growing alignment the platform has been ongoing since the 2020 executive order. In his latest article, it’s clear that after October 7th, the hiring machine inside TikToks operation had begun to spin up yet again. This time, pulling talent from Israel’s Unit 8200. This pool of talent would find themselves within the ranks of TikTok as part of the Trust and Safety team, as well as the head of Global Product Strategy and Operations, head of Global Marketing, Client Solutions Manager, Client Solutions Lead, Account Manager.

Since 2020, TikTok has been slowly integrating itself with the national security state of America and its allies, and since October 7th, with Israel’s inelegance wing. In many ways, TikTok now has a similar composition internally to other social media companies. Reddit, Meta, and Twitter all have state agents working within their equivalent Trust and Safety teams. The net result of this staffing has led to MintPress having their TikTok account banned in July 2023 and Mondoweiss having their account suspended in October 2023. Aljazeera reported that same month that users were seeing a marked decrease in traction on videos that contained the word “Genocide”. TikTok claims that this is not a result of policing political content, and that it simply enforces its Community Guidelines on all its content.

TikTok has been on this road to realignment for the past 5 years. It is an arc that we are now seeing the tail end of. Liberals think they can smell shit in the air as if they were Jim Lahey after crushing a gallon of hard liquor. The reality is, they’ve been boiling in this pot for a long time, living in brunch land. Who knows what the future will hold for your TikTok feed, but do not be fooled into thinking something has suddenly gone horribly wrong over at the TikTok offices. If you are reading these reports from liberals on the app, and also suddenly realizing the reality that’s been true this whole time, you need to kill the liberal in your head.