The events of the last couple of days around TikTok demonstrate how “platform power,” a political science concept developed by Pepper Culpepper and Kathleen Thelen, helps us understand the changes that are happening in politics. Over a period of 24 hours, TikTok took down its popular short-form video services in response to a legal ban, and then brought them back online again. Republicans hope that Americans will see this as a victory for President Trump – even though it was Trump’s first administration that first sought to take TikTok down. They also hope that the TikTok reprieve will generate increased support for Trump among young voters. So how might that work?
New technologies and new influences
The key to understanding this, according to Culpepper and Thelen, is that modern platform companies find themselves in an uniquely powerful political position. People often compare them to ordinary monopolists, but Culpepper and Thelen say that their power is different. Like the Gilded Age trusts that built up railroads, today’s online platforms can not only influence politicians, but also influence consumers directly. New technologies allow them to build up quite direct relationships with individuals, which they can then turn to political advantage. Specifically, in Culpepper and Thelen’s words, these companies:
…. benefit from the direct relationship they enjoy to a large number of consumers who rely on the platform as it becomes integrated into the fabric of their daily lives … today’s largest platforms enjoy a tight, even intimate, connection to their users.
This connection stems from the fact that these companies have an “unmediated link” to their customers through the cell phones that customers “carry in their pockets every day.” That in turn allows these companies to forge active relationships with their users that they can then leverage. They can generate powerful feelings of loyalty in their customers, who feel that these companies’ services liberate them, and allow them to help build their lives. When these companies engage in fights with the government or have to confront regulations, their customers may feel that the companies are also championing their personal freedoms. And these companies typically can directly communicate with their customers, potentially generating a powerful political swell against regulatory measures that they oppose.
This, for example, explains how Uber was able to press back against regulations that it didn’t like. Uber had forged a strong relationship with its customers, who had integrated its services into their lives. The car-share company had clear arguments that these legal changes would not only hurt Uber but its users. And Uber had established a direct channel of communication with its customers through the Uber app, through which it could direct customers to express their unhappiness with the proposed changes, by simply pressing a button that would send a message to politicians. These relationships proved a powerful set of weapons, for example, in the Uber and Lyft battle to get Proposition 22 passed in California, ensuring that their drivers would be categorized as independent contractors, rather than as employees with all the rights that employees have.
TikTok’s platform power in action
Now, we are seeing how TikTok is deploying platform power in unprecedented ways. In September 2020, the first Trump administration sought to take administrative action to ban TikTok as a national security threat. TikTok succeeded in taking a court action to avert this plan. In the intervening years, Trump seems to have softened on TikTok, possibly as a result of friendly contact he has had with one of TikTok’s major U.S. investors.
In early 2024, a bipartisan coalition of politicians drafted and passed a new law, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, that was clearly intended to target TikTok and other Chinese social media companies, with many conservative Republicans taking forceful positions against the company. Again, TikTok took legal action to prevent the law taking effect, which would have required it either to cease its activities in the U.S. – or sell or hand over control to a U.S.-based entity. After a hearing, the Supreme Court acted with remarkable rapidity to affirm the law, rather than to declare it unconstitutional, as TikTok had hoped.
When the law came into effect in the closing hours of the Biden administration, TikTok made its site unavailable, putting up a message saying that “you can’t use TikTok for now” but proclaiming that “[w]e are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office.”
Then, some hours later, it restored service, announcing that “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.! You can continue to create, share and discover all the things you love on TikTok.”
This amounts to a new kind of exercise of platform power. Rather than using platform power against regulations, in the ways that Culpepper and Thelen describe, TikTok is putting this power at the service of a politician, presumably in order to gain his favor. TikTok has built up a powerful relationship with its users, who weave the app and its content into their lives. TikTok is now using its ability to communicate directly with those users to create a narrative in which the incoming U.S. president has saved these users’ ability to create, share, and discover as they want to. This radically expands on Culpepper and Thelen’s logic.
Of course, we don’t know what will happen next. Will TikTok users be grateful to the incoming president in the ways that TikTok suggests they ought to be? Will the president be willing or able to actually save TikTok, given what the law says? How will other Republican politicians, some of whom are less transactional and more hawkish on China than the president, respond? Nonetheless, it is impossible to understand TikTok’s strategy – and its possible ability to deliver on it – without understanding how online platforms have reshaped power relations in the ways that Culpepper and Thelen explain.