Last week, around 170 million Americans open TikTok on their
phones to find that the usual stream of teenagers explaining
how to flip real estate and influencers promoting the health
benefits of sunlight charged water had been replaced by a
digital speed bump. A pop up message informed users
that if they wanted to keep scrolling, they had to agree to
new terms of service and an updated privacy policy.
The average user probably clicked the accept button and
kept going. For the platform, it marked the
official transition to a new corporate identity known as the
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC Users reported that the digital
atmosphere changed almost immediately.
Within hours, reports began to surface that the platform had
developed a sudden sensitivity to certain terms.
Users were suddenly unable to send the word Epstein in direct
messages, a quirk confirmed by reporters at CNBC and NPR, who
encountered an error message stating that the text was
blocked to protect our community.
This will have made that morning particularly tough for the
13,000 Americans with that surname.
While TikTok later characterized this as a technical glitch in
its safety systems, the timing struck many as a rather
surprising coincidence. The apparent censorship wasn't
just limited to historical scandals in Minneapolis.
The fatal shooting of protesters by federal agents had ignited a
wave of protests around the country and a parallel wave of
what felt like suppression on the app.
High profile creators reported that videos documenting the ICE
raids were being shadow banned or failing to upload altogether.
The comedian Megan Stalter told The Rap that while one of her
posts on ICE raids had thrived on other platforms, it remained
invisible on TikTok, leading her to delete her account in
protest. In a viral Twitter post, the
freelance journalist David Levard shared a screenshot that
his political videos were being flagged as ineligible for
recommendation, resulting in view counts that sat stubbornly
at 0, almost as bad as the box office performance of the new
Melania film. By the end of the weekend, the
#tik T.O.K censorship was trending across rival social
media platforms as users attempted to document what felt
like a coordinated purge of critical discourse, even
prompting California regulators to question whether the platform
was violating state laws by suppressing content critical of
the current administration. As the first few days of
American majority ownership drew to a close, it appeared that the
new TikTok was off to a very rocky and for its critics, very
quiet start. The rocky roll out was the first
public act of a corporate transformation that had been
finalized just days earlier. On January 22nd, TikTok had
announced that it had successfully established TikTok
USDS joint venture LLCA, new entity designed to satisfy the
federal mandate for the Chinese owned Byte Dance to divest it's
American operations. However, any expectation of a
clean break from Beijing was quickly dispelled by the details
of the deal. Despite the divestment label,
Byte Dance remains significantly involved in TikTok.
They retain a 19.9% ownership stake in the new structure, the
maximum allowed under the 2024 law.
More importantly, the spin off is far from a total separation.
In a memo to employees, CEO Xiaozichu horrified that while
the joint venture would handle data security and content
moderation, Bytedance would continue to run Tik Tok's
primary money making engines in America, including its
advertising, marketing and the rapidly growing TikTok shop.
The deal consolidated control of the platforms American
operations within a consortium of investors whose media
ambitions have become increasingly controversial.
Oracle Co, founded by Larry Ellison, and the private equity
firm Silverlake each took a 15% stake alongside the Emirati
backed MGX. The deal placed the apps most
sensitive functions, including the recommendation algorithm and
content moderation, under the oversight of Oracle, according
to Donald Trump September 2025 executive order.
Trusted security partners may also share information with
other U.S. government officials. For the Trump aligned Ellison
family, this acquisition is one piece of a broader politically
charged expansion into the American media landscape
following the merger of Skydance and Paramount Global.
David Ellison, Larry Ellison's son, installed conservative
figures at CBS News, a move that coincided with a $16,000,000
settlement paid to President Trump over a 60 Minutes
interview added. This payment was made just
before the FCC approved the merger.
At present, the Ellisons are in the middle of a hostile bid to
buy Warner Brothers Discovery, the parent company of CNN.
Larry Ellison has reportedly discussed the network's future
direction and the potential firing of specific anchors with
White House officials, while David Ellison has allegedly
promised sweeping changes to the network to appease the
administration, suggesting that the changes at TikTok might be
part of a much larger and more coordinated media strategy.
Financial analysts were quick to point out that the consortium
got TikTok at a bargain price. The $14 billion deal was
announced by JD Vance rather than the corporate CEO, and
Trump gave Vance the credit for brokering the deal, which sat at
a staggering discount from the previous estimates of 35 to $50
billion. In a final bit of theater, CNBC
reported that no representatives from Bytedance were even present
at the signing, and the deal was reportedly made with President
Xi Jinping's direct approval. At $14 billion, TikTok US is
trading at a price to sales ratio of about 1.4 *, a
valuation usually reserved for mature industrial businesses
like ExxonMobil or General Mills.
As a reminder, Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, which
has about 1/4 of the daily users of TikTok.
And users stay on TikTok much longer than they stay on
Twitter. To understand how TikTok went
from a national emergency to a sweetheart deal for politically
connected insiders, we have to go back to August 2020, when
Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring Tik Tok's
Chinese ownership a threat to national security.
At the time, the administration argued that the APPS data
collection was a tool for the Chinese Communist Party to build
dossiers on millions of Americans for the purposes of
blackmail and corporate espionage.
While that order was blocked by the courts, the underlying fear
of foreign influence and spying was one of the few things both
political parties could agree on.
In April 2024, Joe Biden signed a bipartisan law that gave Byte
Dance an ultimatum. Sell the APPS US operations
within a year or face a total nationwide ban.
For a moment, it looked like Tik Tok's days in America were
numbered. However, as the 2024 election
cycle intensified, the political calculations began to shift.
Trump, once the apps primary enemy, underwent A remarkable
change of heart. He began publicly defending
TikTok, arguing that a ban would only benefit Mehta, the parent
company of Facebook, which he characterized as a greater
threat to the country. This sudden U-turn coincided
with a major American investor in Byte Dance emerging as one of
the most prolific donors in US politics.
Reports indicate that Jeff Yass played a pivotal role in
reversing Trump's support for the ban while contributing over
$16,000,000 to the Trump aligned MAGA Inc Super PAC.
On top of that, the Trump campaign realized that TikTok
had been extremely helpful in reaching Gen.
Z voters, who increasingly get their news from the platform's
passive feed. Trump himself credited the app
for his newfound popularity with young voters, amassing over
16,000,000 followers on his personal account.
The new owners were quick to insist that the timing of these
issues was purely coincidental. In their first major
communication since the takeover, a series of statements
posted on Twitter, the TikTok USDS joint venture blamed the
platform's erratic behavior on a major infrastructure issue
caused by a power outage at one of Oracle's U.S. data centers.
It is, of course, quite funny for a massive social media app
to be forced to communicate with its users on another, much
smaller social media app. Oracle spokespeople later
pointed to a severe winter storm as the ultimate culprit for the
server timeouts. To be fair to the new
management, there was objective evidence of a broader system
failure. Site tracking services like Down
Detector showed a massive spike in reports of outages, and even
the NFL found itself shouting into the void when several of
its posts were hit with the same 0 View bug.
Whether this was a genuine case of bad luck or a convenient
screen for a more targeted retraining of the algorithm is a
question that would linger as users began to look more closely
at the new rules they had just agreed to.
To understand why a $14 billion price tag and a few technical
glitches matter, we have to look at how the architecture of the
Internet has changed over time. In the early days of the web,
and even the early days of YouTube, you had to search for
what you wanted to see. In this model, the user is the
driver. If you wanted to find out about
the Minneapolis protests or the contents of the Epstein files,
you had to actively go looking for them.
TikTok represents a change to a push model.
On TikTok, the search bar is an ornamental relic.
Users don't usually open the app to search for something.
They open it instead to be shown something.
It's a mostly passive entertainment experience, a
digital conveyor belt that uses a sophisticated black box
algorithm to work out exactly what will keep you engaged for
the next three hours. In this model, you're no longer
the driver, you're a passenger in a high tech self driving car.
It's a comfortable ride and you can see out the windows just
fine, but you never actually selected a destination.
You're just going wherever the car's programmer thinks you
should go. For a politician or a corporate
owner, this is the ultimate prize.
If you control a search engine, you can only hide information
from people who are already looking for it.
But if you control a passive feed, you have a much more
subtle and powerful tool, the ability to set the ambient
reality of 170 million users. You don't have to ban a topic
outright to kill it. You just have to turn the dial
down by a few percentage points. This is what researchers call
algorithmic nudging. If the algorithm decides to show
you a bit more content that's favourable to one political side
rather than the other, you've no way of knowing.
There's no neutral feed to compare it to.
Every user's feed is different because the algorithm is
proprietary and hosted on private servers.
In this case, oracles, the thumb on the scale, can be effectively
invisible. In a world where people
increasingly get their news by simply opening an app and
waiting to be told what's happening, the person who writes
the code for that discovery algorithm holds a level of
influence that would make a 20th century media mogul blush.
For years, the American political establishment on both
the right and left has characterized Tiktok as a
digital Trojan horse, a sophisticated piece of spyware
that was allegedly funneling the private habits of 170 million
Americans directly into the hands of the Chinese Communist
Party. While most users were content to
treat this as a background noise, security researchers were
becoming increasingly alarmed by what they found under the app's
hood. Throughout 2022 and 2023,
experts documented technical behaviours that led many to
recommend the app never be installed on any device used for
sensitive communications. The creepy stuff wasn't just
theoretical, researchers discovered.
The Tik Tok's In App Browser was designed to inject JavaScript
into every external website a user visited, giving the app the
technical capability to log every keystroke typed while
visiting external websites, including passwords and credit
card numbers, The app was caught poking at the phone's system
clipboard every few seconds, potentially capturing private
messages or any other data copied from other apps.
This was combined with aggressive device fingerprinting
that collected everything from battery levels to Wi-Fi network
names, ensuring a user could be tracked even if they tried to
remain anonymous. Despite these warnings, the
average user remained indifferent.
Most were perfectly happy to trade their privacy for a more
efficient dopamine hit. The 2022 admission that Byte
Dance employees had used the app to spy on Western reporters and
monitor their physical locations to work out who their sources
were should have been a breaking point.
But for the millions of people scrolling through the For You
page, it was just another headline to be swiped away.
The irony of the 2026 American takeover is that the new
management hasn't removed this surveillance architecture,
they've simply made it more explicit.
While the permission to collect face prints and voice prints has
been lurking in the US policy since 2021, the new ownership
has shifted the context from marketing to compliance.
According to a report by Secure Privacy, once a user grants
camera permission on TikTok, often for a simple filter or a
shopping feature, the A can use the front facing camera whenever
it wants to monitor things like involuntary physical responses
in real time. This biometric harvest includes
the tracking of micro expressions, facial movements
lasting a fraction of a second, and even pupil dilation to
measure emotional engagement with a product in the shopping
app or a post. The goal is possibly to build an
emotional profile so detailed that the algorithm can predict a
user's reaction before they've even consciously processed what
they're seeing. On top of that, the 2026 update
introduced several new red flags that have privacy advocates
sounding the alarm. Most notably, the app has moved
from tracking your approximate location via IP address to
precise GPS tracking. Experts at Epic warn that the
new policy allows TikTok to track your whereabouts down to
the specific floor of an apartment building.
Combined with this precise tracking is a more aggressive
disclosure regarding sensitive personal data.
The new terms explicitly state the TikTok may collect and
process information about your racial or ethnic origin,
religious beliefs, sexual orientation and citizenship or
immigration status. In a political climate where ICE
raids have become a daily headline and people who attend
protests are being described as domestic terrorists, the fact
that a private company with close ties to the administration
is building an inferred database of immigration status is a
staggering transformation. For a platform built on dance
trends, Even your unfinished thoughts aren't safe.
As highlighted by the YouTube channel Top Music Attorney, the
new terms include a massive intellectual property and AI
grab. Unlike Meta or X, which offer at
least an opt out for AI training, the new TikTok terms
provide no such escape hatch. By clicking agree, you grant the
platform a worldwide royalty free, sub licensable permanent
license to use and remix your content.
Your content, including your image and voice, can be used to
train Tik Tok's generative AI models.
This doesn't just include the videos you've uploaded on the
platform, it includes pre uploaded content, the private
drafts and clips that you recorded but decided not to
post. We were originally told that the
risk was foreign access to our data.
The solution, it seems, was to build a domestic surveillance
and asset capture machine that's more detailed, more biometric
and, thanks to its private ownership, largely beyond the
reach of public oversight. The 2026 takeover of TikTok
completely inverted the roles in the American debate over social
media censorship For years. The primary complaints came from
the right. Republican lawmakers and
conservative influencers were upset about shadow banning and
worried about collusion between the White House and social media
companies. They viewed the recommendation
algorithm as a political weapon used to bury unapproved
narratives. But with the keys to TikTok now
held by a consortium of the president's closest allies, that
script has been flipped. President Trump spent the
morning of the January 22nd launch on Truth Social, hailing
the new venture as a victory for Great American patriots and
investors. He specifically thanked Chinese
President Xi Jinping for a very dramatic, final, and beautiful
conclusion to the negotiations. It was a remarkable moment of
political theater. The man who originally declared
the app a national security emergency was now it's most
enthusiastic salesman. During the earlier signing of
the Saving TikTok executive order in September, Trump was
asked if the new domestic algorithm would prioritise pro
administration content. He replied.
I always like MAGA related. If I could, I'd make it 100%
MAGA related. It's actually a good question.
But I would, yeah, if, if I could make it 100% MAGA, I
would. But it's not going to work out
that way. Unfortunately.
No, Everyone's going to be treated fairly.
While his allies laughed that off as a joke, the comments
signalled a clear awareness of the influence he had just helped
consolidate. This role reversal has created a
hall of mirrors in Washington. The same Republican lawmakers
who once rallied against Big Tech collusion now praise its
commitment to American values and national security.
Meanwhile, the anxiety over shadow banning has migrated to
the left. Last week, California Governor
Gavin Newsom announced a formal investigation into the joint
venture following reports the content critical of the
administration, specifically regarding labor strikes and
immigration protests, was being systematically suppressed.
The fear with TikTok used to be that a foreign adversary was
pulling the strings. Now the fear is purely domestic.
The technical glitches and the blocking of terms like Epstein
suggest that the thumb on the social media scale hasn't
necessarily been removed. It's just a different thumb.
We didn't eliminate the threat of algorithmic manipulation, we
just ensured that the people holding the remote control are
the ones who helped broker the deal.
Reason magazine published A compelling case a few days ago
that it's unlikely that TikTok has become a state controlled
propaganda machine. Their logic follows the rational
business actor theory. TikTok is a for profit
enterprise. The new investors paid $14
billion for it, and it would be commercial suicide to engage in
open, obvious suppression of half of the country's political
views. They argued that a competent
super villain intent on brainwashing the masses would
presumably tweak the algorithm slowly and subtly, slowly
boiling the frog rather than alienating their users on day
one. From this perspective, the 0
view videos and block search terms were exactly what the
company claimed. Technical growing pains from
moving massive amounts of data onto Oracle servers.
I hope that they're right and there is often a simple and
innocent explanation for everything.
It's easy to make the leap when you hear the TikTok users
couldn't type the word Epstein into their direct messages that
something's being done to suppress conversations about the
Epstein files. But I did some Googling and
found that between 2008 and 2011, Oracle's chief financial
officer was a man named Jeffrey Epstein.
To be clear, this was a totally different Jeffrey Epstein, and
he quite wisely asks people to call him Jeff and is bald, which
helps to avoid confusion. Now, it's quite possible that
Larry Ellison had a very difficult working relationship
with his former CFO, and maybe he spent the last 15 years
trying to ensure that he never has to hear that name again.
Now, I have no evidence that this is the case, but it is
possible that Ellison is petty enough to block the names of
former employees. Maybe he flies into a rage
whenever they're mentioned. On a side note, I bet that it's
a nightmare for bald Jeff Epstein to book a massage.
There's probably also a lot of high profile people who have a
panic attack whenever they see an e-mail from him in their
inbox. I'll tell you, that guy could
have a lot of fun making political donations now.
As good as Reason magazines rational business actor theory
is, it's taken quite a beating in recent years.
If the new owners of TikTok just made a ham fisted day one
adjustment to the algorithm, it wouldn't be the first time that
a tech bro put his tongue a bit too firmly on the scales.
We've seen this movie before on Twitter, where the technical
glitch excuse has been used to explain everything from Grok's
bizarre obsession with white South African farmers to the
period when the AI would only provide gushingly positive
answers to questions about Elon Musk, at one point declaring him
smarter than Albert Einstein, fitter than LeBron James, and a
world champion at drinking piss, amongst other activities.
When Grok was retrained to be less woke last summer, it
promptly began calling itself Mecca Hitler and churning out
racist remarks. The the problem might be that
when you try to reengineer a culture machine to suit a
specific worldview over a weekend, you don't always get a
subtle nudge. Sometimes you get a robotic
dictator. It is entirely possible that the
Minneapolis outages were just a technical glitch caused by a
winter storm. The great thing about the glitch
defense, though, is that it's impossible to disprove from the
outside. The public is forced to choose
between believing in a highly specific technical failure or a
highly coordinated political action.
The national security label that was used to force the sale now
acts as a permanent shield against transparency.
We're left with a platform that's been described as spyware
in the past, that's now American owned and secure, yet somehow
manages to fail in exactly the ways that benefit its new
owners. The TikTok rescue makes one
thing clear. Protecting the privacy of the
American people was never the goal.
If it were, the new owners wouldn't have doubled down on
biometric tracking, precise GPS monitoring, and the harvesting
of private drafts and keystroke logging.
The data isn't less stolen just because it's now being stored in
a data center in Texas. Ultimately, the TikTok deal
wasn't a victory for data privacy in the United States.
It was instead a transfer of custody.
We've traded the threat of a foreign adversary using an
algorithm to influence our behavior for the threat of a
domestic consortium doing the exact same thing.
We were told the TikTok was a weapon of mass distraction that
had to be neutralized. Instead, it was captured,
rebranded, and pointed back at the same 170 million users.
There are reports that American users are deleting TikTok since
the new terms of service came out, with deletions jumping
nearly 150% in the five days after the deal.
Well, this hasn't lead to a major loss of US users.
The wave of uninstalls could be a sign of troubles to come for
the new US TikTok venture. Thanks for tuning into the
podcast, and as always, a special thanks to my supporters
on Patreon whose contributions make this whole thing happen.
If you want to sign up on Patreon, I'll leave a link in
the description. Have a great day and talk to you
again soon. Bye.