As of January 22, TikTok is officially under the (partial) ownership of multiple U.S. organizations such as Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. The deal handed control of 45% of the entity to the U.S.-based organization—with ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, continuing to retain at least 19.9%, while investors and new holders control the remaining 35%. With the transfer of TikTok came announcements about changes to TikTok’s For You Page algorithm, which users nationwide are generally upset about.
Over a span of years, U.S. politicians have been persisting that ByteDance sells their ownership to America. Claiming that the app was set up for the Chinese government to spy, censor, and collect information—although all was purely speculation with no real evidence to support this. Lack of evidence, though, didn’t stop the ownership switch.
Content creators, and even users, have recently brought up speculation that after TikTok became U.S.-owned, their videos and feeds have been censored. Videos such as those of I.C.E raids, protests, and opinions on such topics. Specifically, censoring videos that seem to be politically offensive to, and protective of, the right wing.
TikTok has denied claims, yet users are still not convinced. Chris Olsen, an American TikTok creator, displayed screenshots of videos receiving between zero to ten views in the span of hours. Unusual, as he has amassed over six million followers.
Chris is also not the only one. Users from X, YouTube, and Instagram are getting more aggressive as platforms they previously built are slowly becoming useless, and not to mention violating their First Amendment rights. X user Skynoer states: “The TikTok takeover is an ACTUAL constitutional violation of our First Amendment rights (rights to free speech and press) and this is yet another thing rabid constitutionalists should be very loud about, but it’s just crickets.”
TikTok has stated that the problems are being identified currently. Governor of California Gavin Newsom announced an investigation into these claims, which, if true, is critical to the Trump Administration.
As of now, users continue to remain upset and continue to protest TikTok’s “American rebrand,” and, as a part of President Trump’s deal of allowing TikTok to remain operating in the U.S.—nothing can stop Oracle, a major right-leaning company, from creating separate algorithms for American users. This poses questions for the future of TikTok, and whether users will boycott or accept the new consequences of this whole ordeal.
