Kara Swisher predicts a Musk-owned TikTok, 'weaponized' anti-LGBTQ+ tech

Donald Trump's return to the White House in 2025 alongside Elon Musk — who bought Twitter and turned it into X — as a trusted ally has opened the floodgates of issues concerning the legal protections and safe platforms for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Things keep worsening as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also cozies up to Trump. That's not to mention the continuous push and pull between the Trump administration and the future of TikTok, a Chinese-owned social network, as a business that can operate in the United States.

Understandably, LGBTQ+ content creators who built audiences on social platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Meta-owned brands like Facebook or Instagram, and TikTok are now concerned about losing their income sources, becoming targets of even more hate speech, and facing outright censorship.

During such a precarious time, Out contacted award-winning journalist Kara Swisher — host of podcasts On With Kara Swisher and Pivot, as well as an Out100 honoree — to pick her brain about the current state of tech and LGBTQ+ people.

The history of benefits and risks for LGBTQ+ people online.

Swisher isn't new to the discussions of visibility and connection, as well as privacy and protections, for LGBTQ+ people on the internet. Namely, she references her coverage of AOL (America Online) in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a starting point.

"There was a [new] ability for gay people to communicate with each other. It was a really great thing, and the people at AOL encouraged it because these were groups that never could reach out to each other," Swisher highlights. "It really was an astonishing medium to bring together groups that couldn't meet outside. And people don't remember that time."

In her very first book, 1998's aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web, Swisher explained how gay people could find each other through online services provided by AOL, writing:

"With the increase in all kinds of personal information on the Web, and with hackers milling about and credit card numbers floating around, people are growing more and more concerned with ensuring that their privacy is respected. AOL took a particular beating on this issue early in 1998, when an AOL member services representative confirmed to U.S. Navy authorities that a sailor, Timothy R. McVeigh, was the owner of a certain screen name. McVeigh's member profile implied that he was gay; the Navy took the information it had gleaned from the AOL representative and brought proceedings against the sailor."

She went on, "For privacy advocates — and everyone else — it was a chilling reminder that nothing on the web, or on online services, can really be assumed to be secret or protected. As more and more people undertake tasks on the internet, this issue will only grow in importance."

However, Swisher is more concerned about the targeting of the LGBTQ+ community in 2025.

Swisher tells Out, "There was a site called PlanetOut my ex-wife [Megan Smith] ran. They had 17 members from the Vatican… from Vatican City! I don't know who it was, but they got to meet. They got to meet, and it was a big deal." [Editor's note: PlanetOut was formerly Out's parent company.]

"Right now, [the ability to connect online is] being weaponized against the gay community, especially the trans community. But it ruled, those days," she says. "I think it's problematic [now because] they're weaponizing it really effectively, and being able to sort of dehumanize people in different ways. They're putting dehumanization systemically in the system."

She adds, "There's always been antigay hate and anti-LGBTQ+ hate. But it's now being systematized in a way that is 'acceptable.' So it leads to the things that it always leads to. The same thing with anti-Semitism."

Swisher recalls her infamous sweaty Zuckerberg interview.

When asked about Zuckerberg cozying up to Trump after the 2024 election results, Swisher calls back to her own track record interviewing the Meta CEO over the years.

"I did one with [Zuckerberg] and Sheryl Sandberg, and I had interviewed him [alone] previously. But the one that got most attention was the one where he sweat, right? He had to take off his hoodie," Swisher says. "He just [started to] sweat too much, and it was weird, I have to say. It was weird and uncomfortable. I think either I make him nervous, or he had a panic attack, or something else. We were asking about privacy."

That infamous moment happened at the All Things Digital conference of 2010, and clips of Zuckerberg getting progressively sweatier in the interview — to the point of taking off his hoodie, which was rather off-brand for him at the time — have been re-posted as clips all over the internet for years now.

In hindsight, there's a clear contrast between the character played by Jesse Eisenberg in 2010's The Social Network and the "tech bro" who appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to disavow anything Meta has ever done in opposition to Donald Trump.

Swisher notes that she had been "very hard on him around issues of privacy" prior to that interview, but Zuckerberg had always managed to keep up. "In that one case, he really lost it a little bit. I felt bad for him, really, as a person," she explains. "But I did a follow-up interview many years later, in 2018, and it was another one where we argued about anti-Semitism and the difficulties of policing it. He messed up there too."

Zuckerberg "would rather talk about MMA fighting than the impact of his inventions on society at large."

"He tends to have a real problem when I interview him because I press him on pretty tough things, and I would like really good answers," Swisher says. "I think he tends to be very obtuse or say things that don't make any sense. It's often a word salad, which is why he's taken to being interviewed by people who lick him up and down now. That's what he does. He'd rather talk about MMA fighting than the impact of his inventions on society at large."

She concludes, "He avoids that now. He doesn't do any tough interviews. I haven't seen one recently."

Swisher calls out Zuckerberg's actions as "opportunistic."

Swisher's current assessment of Zuckerberg is the following:

"Mark is an incredibly opportunistic craven person. He saw Musk getting a lot of purchase around cozying up to Trump, and giving him money, and supporting him. And Mark has sort of a chip on his shoulder a mile wide, right? I mean, it's like Mount McKinley, or Denali, or whatever you want to call it. He tends to follow depending on what the change is."

Swisher recalls how Zuckerberg "took Trump off the platform when he had that pressure," referencing the widely reported ban of Donald Trump from Facebook for two years (via NPR) that ended in 2023 "with new guardrails to deter repeat offenses," as literally described by Facebook's parent company Meta.

Swisher goes on, "He could have said, 'I just believe in free speech, sorry!' But he didn't. He just changes. I called him a sad weather vane at one point, but it's what he is. He weather-vanes himself throughout his life. So, I don't think he's someone with any particular values except for shareholder value."

"If Harris had won, he'd be very liberal," Swisher observes. "Trump won, so he's now a cool guy and manly, manly, masculine energy, whatever the hell that is. To me, only insecure men do that, deeply insecure men. He'll take whatever is good for Facebook or Meta, and he will do it."

Swisher cites the very first line in her Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, released in 2024, which reads: "As it turned out, it was capitalism after all."

"If you just look at the money, shareholder value, and expansion [of] their businesses, it'll answer every single question you have and without any shame or empathy," Swisher says. "These are people without shame or empathy. If you use that formula, it's relatively easy to see what he's doing here. It suits him, because he feels victimized. He thinks the press is mean to him. He thinks the Biden administration is mean to him. I've never heard such a whiny person on these topics. He's a CEO! If he's interested in masculine energy, he should learn to man up and deal with it."

Swisher believes TikTok will be sold to Elon Musk to continue operating in the U.S. — but warns of a "fake deal."

When asked about the current tensions between the Trump administration and TikTok, Swisher believes that "TikTok is winning. The Chinese government is winning."

But what happens next?

"I think Trump is going to let Elon Musk take over," Swisher says. "I think he is the preferred candidate of the Chinese Communist Party. So that's what's going to happen. But they could do a couple of things."

Namely, Swisher believes that TikTok "could follow the law and do what law says, which is what most people do. That's what Apple and Google are doing right now: they're refusing to let you download [TikTok] because it's against the law. And the Supreme Court said it's against the law. So, I think the responsible companies are following the law. Trump is not following the law, trying to pretend he can give people immunity from this. You can't give people immunity from a law. You just can't. The president has immunity, that's different, and the Supreme Court gave him that."

Swisher argues that Trump could go down the route of changing the law. "He can get his friends in Congress to just do a different law," she theorizes. "That could happen; it's totally possible. But I think he probably won't win. And then it has to go to the Supreme Court, which would probably say, 'No, the new law is not legal.'"

"So he's got to use regular means," Swisher says. "He can do this Elon thing, where Elon owns 50 percent of it, or whatever. That still means the Chinese Communist Party has an ability to influence the platform. He can try to own it locally, which is what it says, but the Chinese won't allow that. They're kind of in a jam there, so I suspect the fake deal, the faux deal, will be the deal that gets done where we don't have protections from possibility of Chinese surveillance. Whether you believe it happens or not, the fact that they can do it is enough for me to say: 'We don't let them own anything else of this size and scope.' They shouldn't be allowed to own this in this country or operate the way other people do."

According to Swisher, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had the best argument she's seen out there. "It's not about First Amendment, it's about association," Swisher says. "People are not allowed to associate with terrorist groups. They go to jail in this country, those who associate with well-known terrorist groups. So, this is about association. They can't own a chip company, they can't own newspapers, they can't own networks. Why do they get to own this? Why do they get to have this much? So, that's a particularly good argument, but we'll see. I think probably he'll do some fake deal."

What is Swisher's advice to LGBTQ+ content creators facing this issue?

"The one thing that's upset me about the TikTok thing is these content creators who've made businesses, for example, on these platforms," Swisher explains. "The issue is: you're beholden to these companies [who] can change anything at any time. I think most of them want diversity, but that means you're sitting right next to antigay stuff, and it depends on who gets the algorithm in their favor."

She concludes, "I remember, at one point on YouTube, there was a bunch of gay and lesbian content, and then ads on there that were antigay… like, conversion therapy ads. I sent it to the head of YouTube at the time. I'm like, 'Really?' But she's like, 'Oh, we can't prevent those.' I was like, 'Why not? Why are they happening?' I was fascinated that here you have all these great gay and lesbian, LGBTQ+ creators, and then they had antigay advertising, and then you realize how difficult it is to monitor this."