And the president has enormous influence over what congress does (veto).

Of course everything is nuanced; the trend is merely interesting especially juxtaposed against people consistently voting for republicans for "economic" reasons.

They are arguing its not the recommender that is unique it is the network effect.

If it was only network effect, then how did TikTok grow in a space where Instagram and Youtube were already much bigger players? How did they gain that user base?

Network effect helps, but it only explains why they stay big, not how they got big

There really isn't that much making TikTok unique. Yes, their app is well designed. Yes, stitches and video replies make for great social/parasocial features because creators are actually interacting with each other and the community, almost like tumblr. But in my opinion those are reasons number three and two why TikTok is successful. Their recommendation algorithm is number one, by a wide margin.

Because back in a day, Instagram and YouTube were shitty products and by some metrics still are

This has been a tough nut to crack, conversationally. My strategy lately has been to flip tue script: Do you think Fascism is bad? How do you define it? What would Trump need to do for you to consider him a fascist.

Its interesting to see at what point and how people try to wiggle out. Its a fun one because common counters of eg "Biden is a communist" are so easy to disassemble, ie im happy to define communist, agree it would be bad, agree we should fight against it, provide specific examples of things Biden could do to fit a communist description, etc.

It helps so far to help the right at least admit to their biased world view. not change it, but at least sort of see it.

Many Americans these days absolutely do disagree with all of those things. Educated ones. Theres simply a short circuit belief based pathway in peoples brains that bypasses everything rational on arbitrary topics.

Most of us used to see it as isolated to religion or niche political points, but increasingly everything os being swept into the "its political" camp.

Fascism always wears populisms clothing, but they aren't therefore directly equivalent. Bernie and Trump both support tariffs but for different reasons (and to different degrees). Likewise you can gush about 1950's factory workers for different reasons. One is purely to do with economic power of the lower class, the other is to do with supposed Golden age of American history. They have overlapping bases but that's merely a part of their Venn diagrams.

Also Trump already passed the massive tax cuts based off the assumption of income from Tariff's, and those tax cuts disproportionately benefit the rich. I don't think we really need a conspiracy to explain the likely motivations.

Its because everyone can see UI, and many have strong opinions on it. Its always the first tragedy of the commons. In a typical tech company built on compromise, fighting the complexity is a fools errand.

To be clear what level of foreign government organizing protests and riots aimed at creating divisions in the US do you consider acceptable?

I hear that sentiment from a lot of right wing friends in US fwiw. IME here it's more a coded speech and / or an escape from difficult conversations. The coded speech part steers it towards general conspiracy topics, which are often a simple way to blanket discard everything "liberal".

An actual example: "What did you think about Bill Gates climate book?" (they'd read it) -> "He was associated with Epstein, he's a creep. I don't trust anything he says". Then, "What do you think about Trumps delaying and denying of Epstein associations" -> "There's so much back and forth, who knows what to believe."

To be clear I think your take is correct, its just I think that if the space were saturated in a direction that were more convenient towards their "team", they won't have much difficulty taking a clear stance.

It will make a _small_ difference, and then also banning individuals from owning multiple homes would be a bigger difference (and then building enough supply, the biggest). We can do all three.

Possibly but that is not the main argument. The main argument is about the lesser of two evils. Do we want to prioritize the open market of SFH ownership, or do we want to prioritize (maximize) the number of people who can own a SFH. Banning multiple SFH ownership would target the latter, with the tradeoff of a restrictive ownership path for wealthy individuals.