President-elect Trump's proposed solution to the TikTok national security crisis took an unexpected turn yesterday when he revealed his primary condition for "saving" the platform: replacing its algorithmic "For You" page with a "For Me" feed showing exclusively his own content.
ByteDance engineers spent six hours attempting to explain recommendation algorithms to Trump using McDonald's drive-thru analogies. "He seemed to follow along until we got to personalization," said senior engineer David Wu. "Then he ordered three Big Macs and insisted they rename the Dollar Menu to the Trump Menu."
"Nobody has better content than Trump, everybody knows this," the President-elect told reporters outside his Mar-a-Lago residence. "ByteDance, great company by way, they came to me and said 'Sir, your videos are getting tremendous engagement, just tremendous.' So I told them, let's make it simple - just show my videos. Problem solved."
As part of the deal's technical overhaul, Trump hired recently fired Twitter engineers to replace TikTok's "weak, low-energy" loading spinner with a rotating gold 'T'. "The old spinner went counter-clockwise - very communist, very suspicious," Trump explained. "Ours spins the American way, and it's trimmed in 24-karat gold. Beautiful thing."
The proposed deal would require TikTok's 170 million U.S. users to scroll through an endless stream of Trump's unedited takes, including his first viral dance challenge - a four-minute video of him swaying side to side to Ave Maria while explaining why his moves are "bigger than BTS."
ByteDance executives, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed confusion about the technical requirements. "He wants us to replace our entire recommendation algorithm with... just him talking?" said one bewildered senior engineer. "That's not even an algorithm. That's just a playlist."
When asked about user choice, Trump dismissed concerns: "People love my content, they can't get enough. Some users are saying they'd rather see dancing videos or cooking tutorials, but that's fake news. The real ratings, the ones they don't want you to see, they're beautiful."
TikTok's parent company has until January 19th to either accept Trump's terms or face a potential shutdown. Meanwhile, rival platform Instagram has reportedly begun development on a "Nobody But Me" feature, just in case.
