Recently, 80% of TikTok was purchased by a new American entity called TikTok US. Who makes up this new entity? Oracle, Silver Lake, and the Emirati investment firm MGX. Right after that happened, users noticed that a lot of content - particularly political content about Minneapolis and ICE - was not being shown. Aaron Parnas, who usually gets over a million views on every video, had a few sitting at 0. Meg Stalter publicly posted elsewhere about deleting TikTok over censorship. My own video about Alex Pretti sat at 0 views for a long time.

TikTok, for their part, has claimed that there was a power outage at one of their data centers that caused the problem. My video has ticked up over 400 views now, though there are no comments on it. Aaron Parnas is back to posting as usual.

Maybe there was just an outage as they said, but you have to dig into this new group to really understand why there’s so much concern about censorship.

Ellison is the founder of Oracle, one of the wealthiest people on the planet, and a friend of Donald Trump. My clearest memory Larry Ellison from when I worked at Oracle (after they bought out the company I was working for at the time) was a town hall. This was just after all 120,000 employees found out they weren’t getting raises that year. Larry called in from his private Hawaiian island, even wearing a polo shirt with the name of said island, and started the town hall with a 20 minute video about Oracle’s sailboat racing team.

Talk about tone deaf.

Oracle’s technology has been a big part of DOGE and Trump’s efforts to reduce costs in the government, happily replacing government workers with dodgy AI tech. It doesn’t take much searching to find happy photos of Ellison posing with Trump and the rest of the evil billionaire’s club. He talks pretty openly about his politics, too.

If CBS isn’t in your political dog house already, you haven’t been paying attention. First, they cancel Stephen Colbert. Why? Because they were courting a buyout from Skydance Media. Why bring this up?

Because Skydance Media is owned by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison.

Just look at the track record of CBS leading up to and since the buyout. Their programming has leaned more and more into conservativism (just look at the Yellowstone franchise). They hired a new editor-in-chief for CBS news in Bari Weiss, far-right former Substacker. 60 Minutes, once a bastion of in-depth, unbiased journalism, paid millions in settlements and has lost much of its credibility.

Skydance Media then tried and failed to purchase Warner Bros. I’m so glad they failed, mostly because part of this buyout would have been to turn CNN into another Fox News.

My fingers are crossed that TikTok’s new owners have no plans to implement censorship. As it is, their new terms of service allow the sale and sharing of personal information at an unprecedented level. But my biggest fear is that they will turn TikTok into the next Twitter. That is, they’re buying it so that they can control the flow of information on social media, shaping the national narrative as they like. That’s what Elon Musk did with Twitter, and it contributed greatly to Trump’s presidential election win.

I’m operating on a wait-and-see approach. No, I don’t like the new ownership or their terms of service, but if they’re not censoring my content, then I’m going to use the tool of the oppressor to keep talking about intersex rights and other important issues.

Maybe I should be looking at YouTube, too. At this point, Alphabet is seeming far less evil than most options out there.