David Pierce

There are lots of good reasons to be worried about censorship.

There are lots of potential censorship problems coming to TikTok.

But rationally speaking, the likelihood that this new group would have taken over TikTok and immediately like smashed a big red censorship button is pretty unlikely anyway.

Very hard to do technically when you take over a platform this huge to change it in any meaningful way just takes time.

And it was in the middle of huge disastrous technical problems that I think are probably the real answer here.

I think one useful analog here is when Elon Musk bought and took over Twitter.

And when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he just said out loud all of the changes he was intending to make, right?

And this was after years of conservatives in particular saying that they were being censored by Twitter's existing leadership.

So Elon Musk comes in and essentially says, I'm going to reverse that.

And then does a bunch of very obvious things that you go on the platform and you spend five minutes on it.

And it just felt different.

You were seeing different posts.

So I think there is a version of this that feels very obvious.

It's just that for right now, there are better, simpler sort of Occam's razor explanations for what's going on.

In that particular one, I think it is 2028 brain pretty aggressively.

Mm-hmm.

Gavin Newsom was responding very directly to all of these reports that the word Epstein was being censored in DMs.

That problem has largely gone away as Oracle's technical problems have gone away.

But I think the fact that if you're Gavin Newsom, that is a politically useful thing to do is very telling.

We've had this six year saga of what's going to happen to TikTok all the way back to the first Trump administration.