TikTok realized the advantage of bowing to autocrats. The tech barons at Trump’s inauguration are following suit
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The chaotic unbanning of TikTok signals a new political fusion between corporate power and American authoritarianism— and Silicon Valley stands eager to serve, writes Io Dodds. We’ll never know what prayers were whispered by the billionaire tech barons — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon head Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Google boss Sundar Pichai — as they sat together inside St John’s Church in Washington DC Monday morning.
![[Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, arrive before the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/20/18/APTOPIX_Trump_Inauguration_45956.jpg)
But while we don’t know what they spoke about, their companies have access to our deepest fears, desires, conversations, and life updates. The power concentrated among these men is stunning when you stop to ponder it. Across the world, Meta regulates the speech of an estimated 3.3 billion daily users — roughly 40 percent of all humanity. Amazon is the world’s second biggest retailer and its fifth biggest employer, governing a global marketplace of smaller vendors. Apple oversees the digital lives of 1.5 billion iPhone users, while SpaceX and OpenAI are shaping the future of space travel and AI respectively.
![[TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in the middle, with Tulsi Gabbard to the right]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/20/22/GettyImages-2194390765-%281%29.jpg)
So we can assume that these men are smart enough — or well enough advised — to understand what they are witnessing: not just the swearing in of a new president, but the birth of a fusion between corporate interests and American authoritarianism. To understand this new frontier, look at what’s happened to TikTok over the past few days. The Supreme Court upheld a new law Friday, forcing the app to be sold off by its Chinese owners or else effectively banned across the U.S.
![[Meta and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan arrive to the inauguration]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/20/20/SEI236711911.jpg)
