TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance has signed binding agreements with U.S. and global investors to operate its business in America, it told employees on Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Qin Zihang/VCG via Getty Images

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.

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Ellison and Catz have a documented record of supporting Israel and its military. Ellison is a major donor to the Israeli military — in 2017, he donated $16.6 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, what was at the time the nonprofit’s largest single donation ever — as well as a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Catz, who stepped down as Oracle’s CEO in September, has also been quite blunt about the company’s ideological agenda. The Israeli American billionaire said while unveiling a new Oracle data center in Jerusalem in 2021, “I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.” The Ellison family has also brought his pro-Israel agenda to CBS News, where Larry’s son, David Ellison, recently installed anti-Palestinian ideologue Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.

TikTok played an important role in the sea change of U.S. opinion about Israel, particularly among young people. It’s why the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the organization I work for, condemned the sale as a “desperate” attempt to silence young Americans.

What’s at stake is no less than whether or not U.S. voters will continue to be able to see what Israel’s military is doing to Palestinians.

What’s at stake is no less than whether or not U.S. voters will continue to be able to see what Israel’s military is doing to Palestinians. While many mainstream media outlets pushed coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza that was deferential to Israeli government talking points, TikTok users watched unfiltered videos of Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinian civilians.

The effects are undeniable: A March Pew Research poll found Israel’s unfavorable rating among Republicans aged 18 to 49 had risen from 35 to 50 percent (among the same age group of Democrats, the country’s unfavorability also climbed almost 10 percentage points to 71 percent). A September New York Times/Siena University survey found 54 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 13 percent expressed greater empathy for Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that he understands the consequences of access to unfiltered social media. He recently described the sale of TikTok as “the most important purchase happening. … I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.” Netanyahu, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza, sees control of TikTok as a part of Israel’s military strategy. “You have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield, and one of the most important ones is social media,” he continued.

President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2024 mandating that ByteDance sell its U.S. operations. That law forced the sale of TikTok under threat of an outright ban, which briefly took effect in January 2025. The new “agreement,” which is reportedly set to close on January 22, will establish a new and separate TikTok joint venture that will control U.S. operations, U.S. user data, and the TikTok algorithm. Just over 80 percent of the new company, dubbed “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC,” will reportedly be owned by investors that include Oracle, private equity group Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. ByteDance will retain a 19.9 percent share.

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The official arguments for forcing the sale focused on preventing Chinese government surveillance of TikTok users, but some elected U.S. officials were more honest. At a McCain Institute forum in May 2024, then-Sen. Mitt Romney said, “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

That’s why advocates for human rights and a free press must work to challenge and reverse this government-sanctioned censorship effort. That means calling on both current and future members of Congress, as well as future White House administrations, to undo this dangerous media consolidation. The Ellison family’s control of TikTok, Paramount, and potentially other massive media properties in the future is a threat to free and open public discourse about U.S. foreign policy, particularly U.S. military support for Israel.

Organizers with the #TakeBackTikTok campaign projected a film about Larry Ellison’s pro-Israel agenda on Oracle’s U.K. headquarters on Dec. 12, 2025. Photo credit: TakeBackTikTok

The work of chilling dissent has already been underway. Even before the 2024 law was passed, TikTok had begun taking steps to silence users who have criticized Israel. In July 2025, TikTok hired Erica Mindel, a former Israeli soldier with a documented record of anti-Palestinian politics, to police user speech on the platform. Given the Israeli military’s long record of propaganda, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, especially toward Palestinians, no former Israeli soldier should have been given the power to police TikTok users’ speech.

Even so, savvy social media users have long demonstrated an ability to organize and evade social media censorship, jumping from platform to platform regardless of what Western billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have tried to do. These challenges will continue in new forms, as demonstrated by the recently launched #TakeBackTikTok campaign. The campaign is pushing for a “user rebellion” in which American TikTok users challenge the Oracle takeover by flooding the platform with content in support of Palestinian liberation. Organizers began making their case last weekend with a massive projection onto Oracle’s U.K. offices.

This is a critical moment. The transfer of TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance to Oracle would mean that TikTok’s content would move from being controlled by a company under the influence of a Chinese government committing genocide against Uyghurs to being controlled by U.S. investors who want to silence TikTok users’ opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Once billionaire anti-Palestinian investors and ideologues take control, TikTok users who are critical of Israel will need to fight even harder and more creatively to evade the suppression of free speech. Millions of U.S. citizens now support an end to unquestioned diplomatic and military support for Israel. Anti-Palestinian billionaires like Ellison and Catz know this full well, and it’s up to us to stand in the way of their efforts to subvert the will of the many.

Correction: December 21, 2025

This story previously stated that, under the deal, Oracle could now moderate the content that 2 billion users see, which is the number of TikTok users globally, rather than in the U.S. As the deal is not yet final, it remains to be seen how many users could be affected.

The post Anti-Palestinian Billionaires Can Now Control What TikTok Users See appeared first on The Intercept.

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