Lauren Hirsch, Tripp Mickle, and Emmett Lindner, reporting for The New York Times:

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that would help clear the way for a coalition of investors to run an American version of TikTok, one that is separate from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, so that it can keep operating in the United States.

The administration has been working for months to find non-Chinese investors for a U.S. TikTok company, which Vice President JD Vance said would be valued at $14 billion.

The White House hasn’t said exactly who would own the U.S. version of TikTok, but the list of potential investors includes several powerful allies of Mr. Trump. The software giant Oracle, whose co-founder is the billionaire Larry Ellison, will take a stake in U.S. TikTok. Mr. Trump has also said that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch is involved. A person familiar with the talks said the Murdoch investments would come through Fox Corporation.

And now, the Emirati investment firm MGX is expected to join the coalition, according to two people familiar with the talks — a surprise, since Mr. Trump said the new investors were “American investors, American companies, great ones, great investors.”

The deal that President Xi Jinping of China reportedly signed off on was 45 percent American ownership and 35 percent Chinese ownership through ByteDance. But $14 billion for one of the most popular and important social media platforms of this decade is practically laughable, and I’m truly not willing to believe anyone from China truly agreed to this ridiculousness. And either way, this deal only gives the American owners the ability to monitor the algorithm, not control it, which bypasses the whole point of the TikTok ban in the first place.

Which brings me to the point: What is even the reason for any of this anymore? The answer is clear-cut fascism, both from the Emiratis who bribed the president and the tech billionaires who would “take a stake in” the platform. That’s not a “stake” — it’s a little win for the president and his supporters so oligarchs can have greater oversight into what Americans consume. When push comes to shove, the majority owners of TikTok will shove, and alarmingly, use their influence to push propaganda on Americans. Even if the algorithm isn’t substantially reworked, the Chinese propaganda is simply being replaced by American propaganda. In the current political climate, those are functionally equivalent.

People are fine with TikTok, and the Trump administration is, too. It has bigger fish to fry, like preventing pregnant women from taking Tylenol or arresting Mexicans for no reason. It’s just my guess that Ellison pushed the tech Trump people so hard to get a stake in this TikTok business so he can operate a platform similar to Elon Musk, who owns X. The X experiment is working remarkably: About 70 percent of the users are bots, and the other 30 percent percolate graphic videos of people being murdered or conspiracy theories about why Tylenol causes autism. Most importantly, it has turned into an echo chamber, where the psychopathic left and psychopathic right bash each other all day and make a fool out of our country for likes.

TikTok, too, will become that cesspool of no value once it’s owned by American billionaires. But if there’s anything I’ve learned from the X saga, it’s that people won’t leave. There’s nothing you can do to get people to leave a platform, even if it is utterly useless. All this does — all this meddling with perfectly fine social platforms contributes to — is sowing discord within the already decimated American political arena. American politics is functionally non-existent: the White House is occupied by a dictator, Congress doesn’t exist in any meaningful capacity, and the Supreme Court has made a habit out of throwing out 249-year-old laws as a pastime. The president’s approval ratings are in the toilet, 80 percent of Americans think America is in a political crisis, and yet Trump won the election not even a year ago. This is a mess, and it’s because of the tyrants operating our social networks and media.

Whether it be Disney taking “Jimmy Kimmel Live” off the air, Paramount halting production of Stephen Colbert’s show, Musk getting a kick out of our nation’s demise, or Ellison winning control of TikTok, it’s all to advance the same agenda: normalizing fascism and controlling the flow of information. Ignorance is strength.