TikTok Already Getting Shittier Under The Ownership Of Trump’s Billionaire Buddies

You might recall how Republicans (with help from Democrats) suffered a three year embolism over the national security, privacy, and propaganda problems inherent with TikTok — only to turn around and let Trump sell the platform to his technofascist billionaire friends. Who are now already hard at work preparing to do all of the stuff they claimed the Chinese were doing. And probably worse.

The deal, finalized last December, involves offloading a large chunk of TikTok to billionaire right wing Trump ally Larry Ellison (fresh off his acquisition of CBS), the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance), anti-democratic zealot Mark Andreessen, and MGX (Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm).

With the paperwork on the “new U.S. TikTok” barely even dry, the company is already informing users that it will be collecting more location data than ever:

“Before this update, the app did not collect the precise, GPS-derived location data of US users. Now, if you give TikTok permission to use your phone’s location services, then the app may collect granular information about your exact whereabouts.”

That’s not great in a country that’s too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law, or to regulate dodgy data brokers that hoover up this sensitive location data and then share it with pretty much any nitwit with two nickels to rub together (including domestic and foreign intelligence agencies).

The “new U.S. TikTok” is already seeing a bunch of weird technical problems. And there are already influencers saying that their criticism of ICE is more frequently running afoul of “community standards guidelines,” though I’ve yet to see a good report fleshing these claims out yet.

As we noted last December, this latest TikTok deal is kind of the worst of all worlds. The Chinese still have an ownership stake in the app, and the companies and individual investors who’ve taken over the app have a long, rich history of supporting authoritarianism and widespread privacy violations.

These Trump-linked billionaires clearly didn’t buy TikTok to protect national security, fix propaganda, or address consumer privacy. They clearly don’t support the kind of policies it would take to actually address those issues, like meaningful privacy laws, media consolidation limits, data broker regulation, media literacy education funding, or kicking corrupt authoritarians out of the White House.

And they didn’t just buy TikTok to make money or undermine a competitor they repeatedly failed to out-innovate in the short-form video space (though that’s certainly a lot of it). They did it to expand surveillance. And, as Musk did with Twitter, to control the modern information space in a way that will coddle their ideologies and marginalize or censor opposition voices they disagree with.

As men like Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen have made abundantly clear to anyone paying attention, their ideologies are unchecked greed and far right wing anti-democratic extremism. Billionaires attempting to dominate media to confuse the public and protect their own, usually selfish best interests is a tale as old as time. And that is, contrary to their claims, the play here as well.

With a new board full of foundationally terrible people, it’s only a matter of time before they, like Elon Musk before them, inevitably start fiddling with the platform and its algorithms to shut down debate and ideology they don’t like. Larry Ellison in particular is clearly attempting to buy up what’s left of crumbling U.S. corporate media and turn it into a safe space for the planet’s unpopular autocrats.

It’s worth reiterating that this was all built on the back of four years of fear mongering about TikTok privacy, propaganda, and national security issues by Republicans who couldn’t actually give the slightest shit about any of those subjects. And aided by the bumbling Keystone Cops in the Democratic party, who actively helped Trump offload the platform to his billionaire buddies.

Then propped up by a lazy corporate press that’s increasingly incapable of explaining to the public what’s actually happening, especially if it involves rich right wingers trying to dominate media.

Most of the dim lawmakers who helped make this happen were kept completely in the dark while this deal was being hashed out by billionaire extremists. And bloviating weirdos like FCC boss Brendan Carr, who spent three years crying like a toddler on cable news about TikTok privacy, will likely never mention the app again now that it’s his extremist authoritarian zealot buddies calling the shots.

I suspect the company will try very hard for a year or so to insist that nothing whatsoever has changed to avoid a mass exodus of TikTok users. Especially in the wake of the promise of new, performative hearings by lawmakers who helped the whole mess happen in the first place.

But the ownership won’t be able to help themselves. Steadily and progressively things will get worse, driving users to another new pesky social media upstart, at which point the billionaire quest for total information control will start all over again.