Opinion: It wasn't just TikTok that went dark. Our democracy died too

Democracy in the U.S. died on January 19, 2025, at midnight Eastern Standard time. 

It may seem as though banning a social media app is not enough to kill democracy. Still, the idea of a government of the people, by the people, a government that enacts laws that help the society that voted them in… that idea is dead. 

Although the Supreme Court declared the law that banned TikTok, an app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is not unconstitutional and does not violate the 1st Amendment because of national security concerns, it is clear that the government has decided it is now in the business of controlling the information that people in the U.S. can have access to. 

The government has decided that only American companies can collect people’s data, but it has failed to prove that it makes us any safer. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has proven that. 

We need a law that protects our information from any company, American or not. But that’s of no concern to either political party. 

Both Democrats and Republicans voted for this law to pass. President Joe Biden signed it into law and even though he declared he wouldn’t enforce it on his last day in office, his declaration wasn’t enough for TikTok not to shut down.

The Biden administration called it a "stunt." In the message announcing the shutdown, TikTok thanked President-elect Donald Trump for declaring he is willing to work with the company. 

He has now declared he will issue an executive order to stall the ban and TikTok has posted on Elon Musk’s social media app X, formerly known as Twitter, that it is now in the process of restoring the service, according to the New York Times. 

But the deed is done. In my view, TikTok, as it was in the U.S., will no longer exist without a wall of protection from the government. Trump finally built his wall, a digital one at least. It was Trump who wanted TikTok banned in the first place. 

TikTok will now decide how to comply with whatever Trump decides is necessary for the company to operate in the country, perhaps controlling the narrative and making sure any dissenting voices get no views and maybe even selling part of its ownership to an American company, like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. 

Tech bros Musk, Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos have pledged their loyalty to Trump by donating money to his inauguration. Google and Microsoft also donated $1 million each for his inauguration. Bezos controls the legacy media institution that is the Washington Post. 

Trump will now control the presidency, the Supreme Court, Congress (although with a small majority, for now), major tech companies, most of the mainstream media and most of social media. He now controls the narrative in almost every aspect of civil society.

I have no illusions about the Democratic party blocking his efforts to turn this country into the oligarchy of his dreams. 

48 Democrat congressional representatives voted for the Laken Riley Act in the House. The Senate is about to vote on it, and it will be part of the aggressive migra takedowns of undocumented migrants. 

Word is already spreading about the planned immigration raids in Chicago right after Trump takes office. 

During the wildfires in Los Angeles, several accounts on social media spread panic about ICE raids happening in different cities throughout the Southland. Much of the information turned out to be false. But what was true was the presence of the Border Patrol in Bakersfield. 

Social media can help with the dissemination of information but without fact-checking, like Zuckerberg is now enacting on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, it will be a deluge of words fighting for accuracy and legitimacy. 

How can we fight against such an enormous amount of lies, misinformation and control of narratives? 

All I know is that we must fight, through the smaller pipelines of information where we can work towards the truth, as evasive as that may seem, as hard as it may be. 

We need to fight against the isolationism that Trump’s government is trying to surround the country with. We need to remember that we are part of the world, that we are human beings and that we deserve a government that actually responds to our needs instead of the needs of the few privileged invited to the indoor inauguration of our incoming president. 

I don’t know what the future holds for us. But we can’t expect anyone to save us. As the saying goes, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.