It was a wild weekend of controversy in which TikTok went black in the US after a federal ban, only to be restored the following day with a surprise notification thanking “President Trump” for intervening on behalf of the platform. It’s a move that’s raised the ire of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who accused the platform of positioning itself to cozy up to the incoming administration and serve as a propaganda tool for right-wing politics.
TikTok users in the US were unable to access the app on January 19, 2025, after a decision by the Supreme Court that maintained a federal ban. The following day, TikTok restored its services, this time with a notification thanking Donald Trump, who will be sworn in as president on Monday, for the resolution.
“We appreciate President Trump’s nod of recognition that we are on the right path, and we thank him for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive,” the notice read. TikTok also issued a statement thanking Trump and promising to work with him on a “long-term solution.”
Ocasio-Cortez did not take kindly to the reference to Trump as “President Trump” when he was not yet inaugurated. She used her Instagram stories to call the notification “a choice” and suggested it was evidence of some kind of backroom cooperation between TikTok and Trump’s administration.
“This is not just a semantic mistake,” she said. “It is TikTok signaling that they have agreed to secretly collaborate with Donald Trump and the Trump administration in private. And for all of the concern that people had about TikTok being a propaganda tool of the Chinese, it’s clear they’re now being used as a propaganda tool for the right.”
Ocasio-Cortez didn’t stop there. She invoked what she saw as a broader pattern at major social media platforms of leaning right, with Tesla chief Elon Musk owning X, formerly called Twitter, while Meta is chaired by Mark Zuckerberg. She also blasted the fact-check blackout on Facebook and Instagram ordered by Zuckerberg – in addition to providing $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
“This is what 21st-century fascism is starting to look like,” Ocasio-Cortez warned, comparing the effort to the media control tactics employed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. “We are on the eve of an authoritarian administration.”
For quite a while now, the way in which TikTok shares content has made it one of the strong weapons of political narrative not only in the U.S. but also across the world. Its voice and amplification of information have been cheered on just as they are interrogated. The criticism by AOC underpins apprehensions that this much influence might be used by political actors to their benefit in shaping public opinion.
In a strong rebuke, Ocasio-Cortez said she would not be attending Trump’s inauguration. “I don’t celebrate rapists, so no, I’m not going to the inauguration,” she said, citing an earlier lawsuit involving Trump and allegations of sexual misconduct.
Although TikTok has not commented on AOC’s criticism, the whole controversy brought once more to the fore the interrelation between politics and social media. As every new day finds these platforms at the center of political debates, a question still lingers if they are neutral facilitators of dialogues or tools for advancing particular agendas.
