I feel like this is an incredibly obvious yes. They were down for 12 hours. They put Trump's name as their savior in the error message... Then the CEO shows up to his inauguration. Trump freely admits that it is because he believes TikTok helped him win the election:

“I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points,” Trump said in December. “And there are those that say TikTok had something to do with that.”

So. Yeah. Of fucking course it was. Fuck national security and all that nonsense, ME ME ME!

I will argue that so was the Israel cease-fire "strong-man" act. In fact my conspiracy theory is that Israel explicitly delayed the cease-fire so that Trump could look strong by finishing it, then whined a bit in the newspapers to sell it. This is not even the first time they GOP has done this, as per the Iran hostages affair.

The only thing that can make Trump look good is his obituary

Lmao, yes.

He "brought it back" before he was even in office. And since no one looks up anything, I'm sure it did it's job.

The original idea came from him. To me it just makes trump a hypocrite

Sort of, yes. It is a counterintelligence/disinformation app, and for that reason it makes MAGA look good. MAGA now controls all 3 of the top disinformation apps: Twitter, Facebook , and Tiktok. This is the war on truth; facts and honesty lost.

Give'em the disease then sell'em the cure.

Trump started the whole thing because he was unpopular on Tiktok. Republicans jumped on board because young people were politically organizing on the platform and they don't like that.

But up to that point, there was no really effort, even as much as they tried to claim "national security".

Then when the real information about Palestine was being spread there the democrats jumped on board because they are the same as republicans when if comes to foreign policy.

That's what started the actual push that gained momentum. They had no actual evidence about the stuff they claimed. Also, if the claim applied to Tiktok, it applies to all the other social media. But they don't actually care about privacy. They only care about a platform that they couldn't control and wasn't catering to them.

If they cared about privacy, they would have pushed general privacy legislation and/or regulation and oversight on all social media.

The reversal was Biden realizing he does not have a good legacy and with Trump, there was a lot more content this time around that was pro-trump (and also tiktok gave him a million dollars). So now he gets to claim he "saved tiktolk" when he was the start of the whole thing.

All CEOs understood how to behave with such an arrogant person: flatter him and he will bow to your every wims.

Yes.

Obviously. They see the game. They played the game.

Why did the Democrats fall for it though?

No, this is just what it looks like when evil encoaches. Having no true ethical or moral obligations it decides everything on a case by case basis and if it can't be controlled then it is destroyed.

It will go on like that for several years now. One shit show, and then the next one, and then the next three ones...

Given that he was the one that called for it to be banned extremely vocally, and he's not been able to keep it banned for more than a few hours even as the now leader of that country, seemingly caving under pressure to flip his stance on the matter (showing off the bat that he's very politically weak)....

I don't see how this makes him look anything but weak, or inept.

Yeah, the super obvious political stunt was a political stunt. It only fools those that don't pay any attention or don't know how anything works. Biden said he would not enforce the order, that trump signed during his first term, to ban tiktok. Then tiktok chose to shut itself down for a day and chose to turn itself back on with its political pandering notice. It is all to manipulate it's users while also paying fealty to the incoming president (because China knows that is how easy he is to control).

TikTok had to make Trump look good as he presumably saves it so they did that stunt. In the end both sides know TT has to agree to selling majority stake because it isn’t anything China didn’t do to US firms multiple times already.

It likely was, hell it had me fooled. I was honestly about to say "Maybe I was wrong about him? Maybe Kamala losing won't be so bad..."

But then he signed the Transgender order and on the same day Musk did the Nazi salute and I'm like "And this is what I get for questioning my own world view."

At least I voted Harris in the election and spent literally only two or three days (17-20) being fooled, and let's be honest, it was Copium, not truly being swayed