The messy truth about TikTok’s Trump-aligned takeover

It’s been just over a week since TikTok — in the United States — transferred into the hands of new owners. And it’s been a mess ever since.

At the government’s urging, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance sold the app to a mostly American group of investors, including the software business giant Oracle (founded by Trump ally Larry Ellison), MGX (an Abu Dhabi-based company also involved in Trump crypto ventures) and the private equity firm Silver Lake. 

But since the new owners took control, the app has seen major outages and malfunctions, claims of censorship and uproar over its updated terms of service. 

Today, Explained guest host Jonquilyn Hill sat down with David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge, to break down people’s concerns about TikTok’s new owners and what this may mean for people’s experiences on the social media app in the future. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

American TikTok has new owners now, and almost immediately after they took over, people started reporting issues with the app. I wanna 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. 

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. There were people who were saying that if you DM’d the word “Epstein” to somebody else that that wouldn’t go through. All of this is more easily and just as successfully explained by normal corporate ineptitude. 

Such as?

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 that had what they called a weather-related issue. 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 smash a big red “censorship” button is pretty unlikely.

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? 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. And then does a bunch of very obvious things. 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-y explanations for what’s going on.

What about the new terms of service that folks had to agree to?

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 gonna do a lot of sort of gen AI stuff inside of TikTok, and that’s data they can collect. 

But, actually, that has been in TikTok’s terms of service for some time. Still, I think it is reasonable to be alarmed that this data is going to be collected by a new group of people.

All of this is the business side; but will my experience on the app change now?

The one thing that actually no other platform has done a good job of replicating [is TikTok’s algorithm]. But now, one of the stipulations of this deal is that there has to be some meaningful separation of that algorithm from Chinese control. The new owners are going to “retrain, test, and update” the algorithm. That is a very vague phrase, but it means in some way the algorithm is going to change. But that we’re going to not see [how] for a while.