Tina Nguyen is a Senior Reporter for The Verge and author of Regulator , covering the second Trump administration, political influencers, tech lobbying and Big Tech vs. Big Government.
Hello and welcome to Regulator. Today is the last day of The Verge’s very good subscription sale: $4 for a month and $35 for the year, for full access to the entire site. Don’t delay!
When we launched Regulator two months ago, the premise was that I’d write about the collision between Big Tech and Big Government. The key word was collision. Tech and politics no longer existed as separate planets that would occasionally cross paths — they were now crashing into each other in very messy and dramatic ways. The plan was to write a column about one subject a week that talked about a recent tech / politics collision.
But dear god, there are so many big events that happened over the last week, and it would be remiss of me to ignore any of them. And in fact, the biggest, most newsworthy political events of the past few days were inseparable from The Verge’s core reporting on tech. Here are the ones that have been stuck in my brain for a while…
TikTok, #Freedom edition: After several months of delays, there is finally (maybe) a deal in place to bring TikTok to America. The current plan, according to the White House, is to sell US operations to a consortium of Trump-allied investors, including Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Michael Dell of Dell Computing. (Unlike recent investments, the US government will not have a stake in TikTok’s US operations.) Several issues are still under discussion — primarily whether the Chinese government will allow the deal to go forward. (As of Tuesday, the Chinese government has not formally acknowledged the executive order.)
For investors, TikTok’s massive user base and gargantuan pile of user data is its most valuable asset. But for President Donald Trump and his political allies, who won over many young TikTok users during the 2024 election, the most valuable part of the app may be its recommendation algorithm — one that they viewed as the friendliest to MAGA influencers, especially after sites like Twitter and Facebook began cracking down on their content post-January 6th. “People on the right, especially young people, were appreciative of TikTok for being around and not canceling people and still paying people out,” Vish Burra, the former communications director for the disgraced Rep. George Santos, told me back in April.
Under the current deal, ByteDance will still retain control of that algorithm and lease it to its US counterpart. But if Trump’s comments indicate anything, he wouldn’t be unhappy if it could nudge TikTok’s recommendations in a MAGA direction. “If I could make it 100 percent MAGA, I would. But it’s not going to work out that way, unfortunately,” Trump said, adding that, “every group, every philosophy, every policy will be treated fairly.”
Jimmy Kimmel Live! returns: The first part of this saga was heavily shaped by the power that the FCC has over broadcast: Brendan Carr threatened to revoke TV station licenses over Kimmel cracking a joke about Charlie Kirk’s killer, Nexstar and Sinclair caved, and ABC parent company Disney immediately suspended the show. But Kimmel’s triumphant return days later wasn’t just a sign that corporations might protect their talent’s free speech during Trump 2.0 — it was also a case study in the declining relevance of broadcast television and the companies that control it.
According to overnight numbers from Nielsen, Kimmel’s return episode drew a staggering 6.2 million viewers the night it was aired live on television — four times its normal viewing audience, despite only 80 percent of television stations airing it. (Nexstar and Sinclair both preempted it with other content.) But those numbers are dwarfed by internet viewership. Fifteen million people watched Kimmel’s monologue on YouTube the next day.
Portland versus MAGA, part 2: Over the course of last week, residents of Portland, Oregon, began seeing a notable surge in federal agents in the city. Shortly after local government officials told residents to remain calm, believing that ICE and DHS were trying to bait them into a fight, Trump authorized the National Guard to use “full force” to protect federal agents in the city.
... continue reading