How TikTok Courted Conservatives Before Trump’s Win

Art by Clark Miller

and

More than a year before Donald Trump’s landslide victory in last week’s presidential election, TikTok’s top leaders insisted on a major shift in the app’s content moderation principles to make the platform more appealing for Trump and his supporters.

In a series of internal meetings, U.S. public policy chief Michael Beckerman, backed up by CEO Shou Zi Chew, argued that the content moderation policies TikTok then had in force had turned the app into a platform that appealed mostly to the liberal half of the U.S. population, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Beckerman cited examples of videos that had been removed by TikTok’s trust and safety team, including some that contained socially conservative statements on topics such as transgender people, and wanted to know why they had been removed.