Chapter 1: What recent changes have occurred with TikTok's ownership in the US?
Your algorithm is under new ownership. A mostly American group of investors recently took over American TikTok. American lawmakers forced the sale, citing data and privacy concerns because of the app's Chinese ownership. Since the handoff, things aren't going great. Oh, we're definitely being censored slash silenced.
Who else is having issues with TikTok muting a portion of their videos when they upload them?
Chapter 2: How are users experiencing censorship issues on TikTok?
Y'all, TikTok is going downhill fast, I fear.
It turns out lots of people miss their corporate Chinese overlords. And that's not the only trouble at American TikTok. I'm Jonquan Hill, sitting in the host chair. The trials of TikTok coming up on Today Explained from Vox.
I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen and the water was pitch black. I started swimming and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below.
I'm Phoebe Judge and this is Love, a show about the surprising things that love can make us do. More than 100 episodes available now on This Is Love.
Chapter 3: What technical problems are affecting TikTok's functionality?
You're listening to Today Explained.
David Pierce, I'm the editor-at-large at The Verge.
All right. So American TikTok has new owners now. And almost immediately after they took over, people started reporting issues with the app. I want to start with the big one. People said that they were being censored. What's going on there and what are the complaints?
That is the big one. It's also the most complicated one to sort through because fundamentally it's about feelings. So a thing to understand is that everybody has always believed they're being censored on social media. Since time immemorial, this is the story of social media.
What's happening on TikTok is at this particular moment, I believe less about censorship and more about normal internet problems. Ooh.
Ooh.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of TikTok's new algorithm changes?
There were a lot of people reporting that they would upload videos around what was happening in Minneapolis and those videos would get no views or those videos would actually not upload properly.
So I can't post anything about what happened yesterday in Minnesota. So I'm going to be very selective with my words.
If you talk about ice or anything political, if you're even talking about the weather, zero views. We're already seeing proof of suppression. There were people who were saying that if you DMed the word Epstein to somebody else, that that wouldn't go through.
Insanely, you now cannot use the word Epstein in TikTok DMs and are immediately flagged for community violation.
Can't use the word Epstein on TikTok since Trump allies took ownership. Absolutely CCP levels of censorship.
All of this is more easily and just as successfully explained by normal corporate ineptitude. which is that TikTok's new data center provider, Oracle, had a huge outage. What we think we know is that it was a big data center in Virginia had what they called a weather-related issue, which I live in Virginia, and I have spent a whole week having weather-related issues.
So I find that deeply relatable. Oh, there's still snow on the ground where I'm from. Yeah, I have a very hard time imagining anybody not having weather-related issues right now. But so there was a big power outage. They've had big issues at the data center, and that seems to be the actual culprit here. There are lots of good reasons to be worried about censorship.
There are lots of potential censorship problems coming to TikTok. But rationally speaking, the likelihood that this new group would have taken over TikTok and immediately like smashed a big red censorship button is pretty unlikely anyway.
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Chapter 5: How does TikTok's data collection policy differ under new ownership?
Very hard to do technically when you take over a platform this huge to change it in any meaningful way just takes time. And it was in the middle of huge disastrous technical problems that I think are probably the real answer here.
Is there a way for us to actually know? I mean, people are pretty skeptical of TikTok right now.
I think one useful analog here is when Elon Musk bought and took over Twitter. And when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he just said out loud all of the changes he was intending to make, right?
We want to be just very reluctant to delete things, just be very cautious with permanent bans.
And this was after years of conservatives in particular saying that they were being censored by Twitter's existing leadership. So Elon Musk comes in and essentially says, I'm going to reverse that.
Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don't like to say things you don't like.
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Chapter 6: Will user experience on TikTok change with the new owners?
And then does a bunch of very obvious things that you go on the platform and you spend five minutes on it. And it just felt different. You were seeing different posts. So I think there is a version of this that feels very obvious. It's just that for right now, there are better, simpler sort of Occam's razor explanations for what's going on.
California Governor Gavin Newsom says he's going to investigate TikTok censorship. Is there anything to that? Or is he just, you know, someone with 2028 on the brain?
In that particular one, I think it is 2028 brain pretty aggressively. Mm-hmm. Gavin Newsom was responding very directly to all of these reports that the word Epstein was being censored in DMs. That problem has largely gone away as Oracle's technical problems have gone away. But I think the fact that if you're Gavin Newsom, that is a politically useful thing to do is very telling.
We've had this six year saga of what's going to happen to TikTok all the way back to the first Trump administration. At first, Donald Trump wanted to ban TikTok.
We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok.
And then Trump discovered pretty clearly how important TikTok was in getting him elected again in 2024. The U.S.
should be entitled to get half of TikTok.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential risks of TikTok's new terms of service?
and all of a sudden saw it as a politically useful platform and then engineered the thing to be sold to some of his close friends and allies.
American investors and American companies, great ones, great investors, the biggest.
If you just look at the set of things that has happened, it would be surprising if it doesn't end up being a politically geared right wing coded platform. And so if you're Gavin Newsom to say, I am going to be your champion to keep TikTok as the thing that you want and not turned into the kind of cesspool that X has become, it's a smart move.
I think something that's poured gas on this is something that you mentioned, which is who these new owners are. Tell us about them.
Sure. So the new owners of TikTok are essentially three players that matter. One is Oracle, the huge old Silicon Valley company owned by Larry Ellison, who is a very close friend of President Trump's. Which we've covered on the show.
Ellison's, meet the Ellison's, the newest right-wing billionaire family.
Um, MGX, which is an investment firm located in Abu Dhabi and Silver Lake, which is a huge private equity firm that is invested in just everything you can possibly think of. Um, each of them has 15% of this new company. The new company is called TikTok USDS joint venture LLC, which really just rolls off the tongue. Yeah. Uh, but everybody just calls it TikTok US.
So for all intents and purposes, it's Oracle, MGX, and Silver Lake are the controlling new investors in this company. And most importantly of all is Oracle, right? Oracle is in charge of the algorithm. It's in charge of the privacy.
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Chapter 8: How does the current legal landscape affect social media platforms like TikTok?
It's in charge of the data security. 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.
Larry made his money with technology.
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.
You know, what is also not abstract is that there were new terms of service that folks had to agree to. What do we know about what's changing?
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.
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