David Pierce

All of the things that made this a national security issue in the first place are now up to Oracle to solve.

So I think Larry Ellison is the single most important person for the new TikTok.

you have this group of people with very similar politics, with a very clear understanding of what you can do when you own a platform like this.

And if you look at TikTok and you say, okay, this is actually an incredibly valuable, just information dissemination product in the United States.

and you are a political animal, of course you're going to look at that and say, actually, this thing that we've been railing against, which is fears of the Chinese government melting our brains with dance crazes, we can just do that for our own purposes.

There are lots of good and fair questions to ask about what the Chinese government was doing, both in terms of the data they were collecting about U.S.

citizens and the way that the Chinese government might be skewing the algorithm

to show certain things to Americans or not.

But the difference now is we see what the government is doing.

Right now, instead of saying, okay, it's this sort of abstract big bad that is China, but you look around and it's like, okay, it's actually very obvious what the Trump administration is up to and the ways in which they want to control information and the ways in which fascism is creeping across the way that we communicate with each other in so many ways.

And that is not abstract.

And you can just say, oh, okay, if you give...

Donald Trump, the means of showing people videos that they watch for hours a day, like it's not unclear what he's going to do with it.

And so I think this stuff is both sort of literally closer to home for a lot of these users, but also it's just much more obvious what it would look like if it goes wrong.

Okay, this is a tricky one because one of the very funny things about terms of service on apps like these is that they're always terrifying.

And they're often terrifying for totally non-terrifying reasons.

What happened in this case is there are some new things in the terms of service.

The new TikTok US is going to collect more precise location data if you allow it.

It also gives TikTok permission to collect a bunch of data around kind of nebulous AI things that make it clear they're going to do a lot of sort of gen AI stuff inside of TikTok and that's data it can collect.

But there was one thing that a lot of people got really nervous about.