Under the TikTok deal, its Chinese owners will sell U.S. operations to a group of pro-Israel billionaires eager to censor critical content.

The TikTok deal announced on Thursday poses a fundamental threat to free and honest discourse about Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Under the reported deal, the Chinese company that owns the short-video social media app, ByteDance, will transfer control of TikTok’s algorithm and other U.S. operations to a new consortium of investors led by the U.S. technology company Oracle. The long-gestating deal will give Oracle’s billionaire pro-Trump board members Larry Ellison and Safra Catz the power to impose their anti-Palestinian agenda over the content that TikTok users see.

Most mainstream U.S. media coverage of the TikTok deal has completely ignored the explicitly anti-Palestinian agenda of its biggest Western investors. TikTok has played a critical role in helping hundreds of millions of users see the ugly reality of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. But the Trump-favored billionaires who will take over TikTok’s U.S. operations have a documented agenda of both suppressing voices critical of Israel and supporting the very Israeli military that has killed so many Palestinian civilians. Without safeguards in place, TikTok’s U.S. operations could soon become an exercise in blocking users from seeing and reacting to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by a major U.S. ally.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    27 days ago

    Rip. It was good while it lasted.

    Leftism on tiktok will be toast in a matter of months. Existing circles will be fine but growth will absolutely plummet.

    What will be leftover in the algo will be funnies, animals, thirst traps, dances (crosses over with thirst traps), videogames, the most libshit annoying content you’ve ever seen, and nationalist slop.

    • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      27 days ago

      Existing circles will be fine but growth will absolutely plummet.

      i’ve been wondering what’s will happen to the large pro-palestinian user base and assumed that this would be the case as well.

      however many of those circles are millions of followers large and it’s hard to image that tiktok’s new owners will let that stand.

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        27 days ago

        It’s a bit like Twitter, there’s a huge contingent of the British left still on twitter, growth has basically flatlined but access to their existing audience is still there so it’s still used purely for reach. I basically expect similar but less overtly fascist outcomes because the new caretakers aren’t as incompetent as Musk.

        • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          26 days ago

          the people i follow on tiktok share very solid information that i seemingly can’t get anywhere else and i had assumed that they would get banned eventually; i suspect i’m going to be stuck with it now.

  • marxisthayaca [he/him,they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    18·
    27 days ago

    I have some perverse curiosity as to how much worse the tik tok algorithm will get. But I won’t last long. When Trump stayed the federal ban and the entire feed was “thank you trump” made you want to puke. And i got to quit for a good long while.

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      27 days ago

      Yeah, fuck TikTok and what a bunch of forced ring-kissing.

      Got banned from them too for fighting back against chuds in the comments. They get to say whatever they want and no mod would dare to lift a finger on them, but the algorithm automatically takes down everything I say right back. Something tells me tech didn’t “suddenly” favor chuds.