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TikTok will soon have new American oligarch overlords. If Donald Trump is to be believed, Lachlan Murdoch, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison are potential investors in a deal to keep the social-media giant in the United States. Trump has been actively thwarting legislation, signed into law under Joe Biden with bipartisan majorities, to force a sale to the U.S. because TikTok is currently owned by ByteDance, which has close ties to the Chinese government. If members of Congress under Biden rightly sweated the implications of a Chinese Communist Party–linked social-media platform holding sway over American citizens, the outcome of American TikTok ownership could mean censorship of a different kind — against pro-Palestine content, which has proliferated on the platform.
For the Israel hawks in the MAGA orbit — and those in general who want Trump-aligned forces to wield as much power over what we see and hear as possible — it will be a great day when TikTok is sold. We could be moving closer to state social media of the American sort, with big-tech bosses straining to remain in Trump’s good graces. As much as this is a story of the president’s authoritarian id, it’s also far more an outgrowth of the consolidation of business in American life and the terrifying clout corporations now wield. The Murdoch family may soon have a social-media behemoth to add to its News Corp and Fox empire. This should chill us all.
And then there’s Ellison’s Oracle, which has drawn close to Trump as it has clamped down on pro-Palestine activism within its own company. Oracle itself collaborates closely with the Israeli government on technology and military infrastructure. Ellison once offered Benjamin Netanyahu a place on Oracle’s board of directors and invited him to visit his private Hawaiian island. In 2021, Oracle became the first multinational tech company to offer cloud services in the country, establishing a $319 million data center in Jerusalem. If the Murdoch family does less business in Israel — the U.S., the U.K., and Australia are, for them, more lucrative — they remain fiercely supportive of the Jewish state and Netanyahu’s war in Gaza. The Murdoch-owned New York Post, along with Fox News, routinely smears pro-Palestine activists and venerates the Israeli military.
What the new potential ownership may learn is that TikTok, even with its enduring popularity among the youth, won’t be enough to turn the tide of public opinion in Israel’s favor. If pro-Palestine influencers are suppressed and images from the war are shoved off the platform, there will be enough alternative sources of information — mainstream news, YouTube, Reddit, even X — available for consumption. An Oracle-controlled TikTok cannot win this propaganda war. Americans under 40 have turned sharply against Israel, and nothing can be done in the near term to alter that reality. Nothing too will change how much the Democratic Party will tilt away from Israel in the coming years. A pro-Palestine socialist is on track to become the next mayor of New York City, and more and more members of Congress are willing to condition military aid to Israel. Prominent national candidates in this cycle are no longer kowtowing to the Israel lobby as they once did. The word genocide is being spoken much more frequently.
In the meantime, pro-Palestine influencers and activists who have grown comfortable on TikTok should prepare for a new reality in which, under an Ellison-Murdoch consortium, they are shadow banned or faced with harassment from right-wing accounts boosted by a new algorithm. In that sense, TikTok could resemble Elon Musk’s X, which has swerved rightward under his stewardship. Social media, liberal-tilted in the 2010s, will have completed its hard-right turn, and liberals and leftists will have a choice: remain on that terrain or huddle elsewhere. The internet will continue its great fragmentation with different ideologies clustering in different corners and the old town squares, long polluted, fading away.
Practically speaking, suppression of speech simply doesn’t work. The left had hoped, over the past decade, that deplatforming would weaken the far right. Instead, both MAGA and further-right voices simply gained clout. On Tuesday, Google announced it was offering an opportunity for a number of right-wing figures who had been banned from YouTube to be reinstated, including Dan Bongino and Steve Bannon. The Biden-era bans, which were enforced because of policies pertaining to COVID and election misinformation, didn’t slow either Bannon or Bongino, both of whom enjoy enormous online followings and the latter of whom serves as Trump’s deputy FBI director. The bans did not keep dissident COVID views from proliferating on the internet, either.
The right-wing takeover of TikTok could, at minimum, herald a post-social-media world. If younger users feel genuinely censored — or see, as with Facebook, their user experience increasingly degraded — they’ll opt out. X and Facebook have lost a great deal of relevance with Gen Z, and there’s no reason to believe TikTok will have an eternal hold on teens and 20-somethings. If the American owners are smart, they’ll avoid heavy content moderation and allow the natural proliferation of alternative viewpoints; they won’t try to engineer a false consensus around Israel. Lachlan Murdoch may even take a cue from his father, who has permitted The Wall Street Journal to be a conventional, well-regarded news organization even as he has transformed most of his other media properties into frothing organs of the political right. Rupert Murdoch leaves The Wall Street Journal alone. It’s hard to imagine the American TikTok oligarchs showing such restraint.
