TikTok To Be Sold To Trump’s Right Wing Billionaire Buddies And Converted Into A Propaganda Mill
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/17/tiktok-to-be-sold-to-trumps-right-wing-billionaire-buddies-and-converted-into-a-propaganda-mill/Open linkView original on lemmy.world1053
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TikTok US to be rebranded as LikKok
Damn you … I shot coffee out my nose with that. 😂
Burn baby burn!
Comes in flavours, likkok orange, and likkok red.
Is it not already a propaganda mill by convention? I assumed that was part of the deal to continue operating.
Well...
Before it was a vague sinophobic conspiracy theory pushed by big tech and other fascists... Now it's a reality.
The only time I ever hear the term "sinophobic", it's someone using it to hand-wave away criticisms of the Chinese government.
Sort of like "anti-semitic" and criticisms of Israel.
Didn’t you invalidate your own comment though?
No?
You should read the comment you replied to then. Or is it your own you’re confused about?
The person I replied to was saying that the idea that Tiktok was a Chinese propaganda machine was a "vague 'Sinophobic' conspiracy theory", and I'm pointing out how they used 'sinophobic' to dismiss a legitimate concern about a state government. Much like people use "anti-semitic". Or "Russophobic".
What are you confused about? How did I invalidate my own comment? Please elaborate.
You dismissed sinophobia by admitting you dismiss the existence of sinophobia. Both in your first comment, and your most recent one.
If you recognized the sinophobia pointed out to you, your comment would invalidate itself. It seems, however, that you are unable and/or unwilling to do so, which takes away credibility from the rest of your claims.
It wasn't always purely right wing propaganda, they want it full right wint propaganda,
Yeah I thought this deal happened months ago. I guess now they're being public about it.
I’m pretty active on there and my entire feed is academic and thoughtful left-leaning commentary. Granted I had to work at curating it. Day one was all thirst traps. But now I really enjoy it. I will actually be sad when it becomes unusable.
Young people decide what's popular, if you fuck it up they will bail for another platform. Hopefully someone spins up a competitor quickly to grab the people in between the forced "new app"
Dude Facebook hasn't been cool in a decade and it's still very much a thing
It’s alive due to Messenger and Marketplace.
God, I miss Craigslist.
Craigslist still exists. Use it.
Craigslist exists like my totaled car exists: yeah, it's technically there, but it's a shell of itself and doesn't actually have anything worthwhile. Maybe in large metros it's still a viable option, but even in a 250,000 people metro it's a ghost town.
Can't buy things if no one is selling there, can't sell things if no one is buying there.
Yeah, I hate that I had to use Facebook market as it was probably the first time I had logged in in years. But there were easily 20x more results when I was looking for a server rack on there than CL.
I just bought a great bike using Craigslist in February. Maybe it's a locality thing, folk use a different platform near you but it still gets plenty of traffic here.
I still use Craigslist! Have alerts set up right now
Craigslist is still around although not as active as Facebook Marketplace.
wait until the boomer generation stops using it...
I've been waiting for the boomer generation to stop any of what they're doing for 30 years. I suspect they'll still be a viable political bloc for the next 20 years. And even then, gen x and gen z will pick up right where they left off.
Genz conservative voters tend to be more right wing than their parents or boomers family. That's why they want to target the younger population
The mass die-off of boomers will be a great thing. They ain't all bad, but they are the worst generation. Absolute poison.
Based on my parents, I’m pretty sure it’s genx keeping it alive.
At least in 50 more years humanity will finally be free of Zuckerberg
I don’t think that will be enough time…
Lol, you mean when they die? Yeah, that's not a bad point. They aren't getting any younger.
the dieing days are here for the first wave of boomers and it's only going to increase.... day by day
im genx and I'm of the opinion that my parents and their generation are the most selfish and most self centered generation in the history of this country. They spoiled their opportunities to do what they thought was right as young people.... so some genxrs are also pieces of shit but most people of my generation understand we are a skipped generation and the young people are the future. We are not like our parents that is for sure.
I just had this funny thought— so boomers adopted and settled into Facebook after millennials made it popular. And then everyone except for boomers stopped actively using it. It’s kind of their “retirement social media platform.”
Now you have TikTok, which the millennials flocked to after GenZ popularized it. Does this mean after Gen Z flees the platform that it’s just going to be the Facebook equivalent for millennials?
I dunno.. I'm a millennial and no one I know uses TikTok, they all use Instagram.Anecdotal, sure, but still.
I'd say the biggest difference is that Millennials tend to be more aware that Boomers of who else is actually using the platform and why, and to have/acquire knowledge about other platforms and transition to something new.
Ya because of boomers and people using messenger and marketplace
I'd be genuinely curious what the real age demographic of regular Facebook users is in America, but I highly doubt Meta would ever release those figures.
Doubt they can even sort out who is and isn't a not, themselves
You're underestimating the propaganda machine . All those right-wing influencers didn't get to the top of every chart because young people decided them to be popular.
Susan Wojiciki genuinely spearheaded the rise of the far right on social media by giving endless support and exposure to the likes of the Paul brothers, Mr.Beast, and right wing commentators who regularly broke ToS but rarely if ever got banned or demonitized for it.
She truly was the Ronald Reagan of social media personalities. May she burn in Hell.
Done and done.
Wouldn't it be cool if people used loops instead!
You have to use words like "unalive" and it's still popular?
They might also start using another platform. But they’re unlikely to leave completely.
Cory Doctorow put out the first hour of the audiobook on Enshittification for free, and it covers this very well.
True for us 1%ers, nobody else seems to give a fuck.
"you sweet, summer child"
First and foremost: That is not what this is about. Well, that isn't what the sane parts of this is about. It isn't that tiktok is too popular.
It is that it is very blatantly a tool of the CCP. Much like facebook and twitter are tools of the US government. There are many articles documenting how facebook has been used to steal elections and... fuel coups. And musk et al are pretty open that they did the same with twitter and the 2024 US Presidential election. And... it is hard to not be suspicious when "tiktok is the only streaming platform that is willing to talk about the genocide in Palestine" and "I refuse to vote for genocide, full stop" were so tightly coupled.
No country should allow such blatant manipulation of its people by a foreign nation. Whether it is the US, Russia (see: RT getting banned the fuck out of most western nations), China, or even frigging Mauritius.
Second... Do you really think People have that much agency? Not individuals, but People.
Trump made a deal with TikTok that allowed them to continue operating. How likely is it that they were allowed to choose the ranking algorithm freely?
It was already a propaganda mill. Now it will be for the Nazis instead of China.
Oh it's been working for GovCo and Israel since it came back from the 1 day ban and Chou started licking Chumps ass. The change was immediate and noticeable.
Yup every top comment on TikTok now is almost always the most divisive shit. I assume they’re doing the equivalent of reddits “sort by controversial”. It changed as soon as it came back.
Of course it was about Israel
It will actually be for both! Emphasis on the part of the article where it says China will still have a stake of 20% in the company, AND they get to keep the algorithm.
All the US is doing is buying up physical assets and infrastructure, and the user base. The juicy bits they wanted, they didn't get. Everyone is likely going to jump off of TikTok the moment it comes time to segment the US market from the Rest of the World. China doesn't have to do a thing because Douyin is already maintained separately for the Chinese market.
The thing that will kill this is forcing users to migrate to a new app. Removing the largest friction barrier that prevents people from leaving your app by forcing them to cross it is a great way to scatter the TikTok userbase to the four winds.
I hope this kills TikTok, and that the people who enjoyed using it remember who was responsible for it.
Nobody really wanted to grapple with the reality. They just saw "Chinese investors mean Communist propaganda means Americans most be protected from the thing". Then Cold War brainrot kicked in and that was that.
A country that fumbles this hard doesn't deserve to exist.
It's the same kind of people who think Socialism means Communism, without realizing that anything funded by taxpayers is already, technically, a socialized knowledge/service/product. That includes the roads their vehicles drive on and the military if you want to put it that far.
One might incorporate principles of the other, but that doesn't make it the other product automatically.
In the meantime, the Poopaganda machine will continue running with the kind of ignorance being shown.
"Socialism is when the government does things" is dumber than thinking socialism and communism are the same thing.
Let's be real. They're all working together.
Now it will be for the US fascists instead of chinese fascists, Nazis were german.
Now it will be overt instead of a vague conspiracy.
Don't worry.
The Dems are just about to write a sternly-worded letter.
*An official letter, signed by at least three colleagues.
Schmuck Schumer is hard at work, editing his last one, so we don't think it's the same one.
Jokes on him, nobody is paying any attention to him anyway. He could give the same speech every time, and nobody would even notice.
What a loser. If we aren't going to kick him out, just ignore him, and let him get back to his insider trading. That's his only priority anyway. He might as well be a MAGA.
Yep.
JFC
If we're lucky they'll do something that speaks to the youth, like doing Tiktok dances in protest
One can only hope, friend.
And they will even threaten to wag their fingers!
Voters made sure they can't do anything else.
Dems made sure they can't do anything else.
Chat GPT, I need a sternly worded letter please.
Oh words many sternly worded words in a letter.
I don't mean a letter with words on it, I mean I want to tell a group of people things so I want to write those ideas down on paper in a sternly way..
No I'm not angry! You know what? I'm just gonna do this by myself!
US media fell for it again award. This is how Trump always negotiates he announces a "deal" that's actually just his initial offer and then calls up whoever it is and begs them to play along and not embarrass him because he already announced it, which works on NYC construction contractors but Xi doesn't give a shit.
Like the backpedaling of Trump's T1 phone to initially be claimed as "Made in America" until being publicly called out, not only by inquisitive people but also by a company furthest along in producing a fully "Made in USA" phone. The T1 phone marketing has been relegated to featuring a "proudly American" design.
::: spoiler Sources
Kind of sad that you have to root for a fascist dictator prick to keep the fascist wannabe dictator prick in check.
Well, we root for the more rational and predictable dictator.
Thanks for posting that. I was looking for confirmation or debunk and this adds some clarity.
I wonder if they'll actually sell the code source... that would be surprising. The best they'll get may be just a compiled version they can't do anything with.
TikTok has been faithfully pushing US propaganda for years. Mintpress News put out an article on it. Control of the US servers was handed over to Oracle, who let the State Dept have full control of what to censor.
This is your reminder that tiktok has always been brain rot and you need to delete your account and app.
The fact it was bought by Nazi's to spread their propaganda is just one more reason for people to delete the app and give them the least amount of views possible.
I would love to start a petition to ban tiktok in states once they turn it into GestapoTok. I mean the right is all about states rights right?
Yeah but uncensored brainrot is still better than propaganda brainrot.
One of the reasons tiktok became so popular is that it didn't go around banning entire swaths of content under the guise of "healthy content" like Facebook (Insta), X, and Reddit do.
This isn't even a Trump issue specifically, Biden wanted TIkTok to do the same. Either follow policy demands or sell to an American owner.
In what fantasyland is Tiktok uncensored? Tiktok is the whole reason we get screenshots where words like sex, kill, dead, gun, assault, rape, and every swear word imaginable are censored. Tiktok is the reason for euphemisms like "seggs" (sex) and "grape" (rape). There was a time when food content struggled on Tiktok because you'd get shadow banned for having a knife in your video.
those concepts arent the ones americans at-large are being blinded to, nor the ones the establishment american government is worried about
That's irrelevant. The claim was that Tiktok is uncensored, not that it didn't censor the things "Americans at large are being blinded to". If they'll censor one thing, they'll censor anything, as we've already seen with pro-Palestine content.
not talking about palestine, that is just a(n ever more obvious) distraction from problems closer to home
I don't care what you're talking about, your point is nonsense. Tiktok is censored. If they censor one thing, nothing is off the table.
It's always been propaganda brainrot. The CCP was just more subtle about it by suppressing content that was critical of them, suppressing content by "ugly" people, and quietly siphoning all of your data.
And no, that's not en endorsement of any alternative. They'll all bad. That just all have different bias.
Half the reason it was banned was because they would not put the fix in against Israel criticism. For some reason the video footage of our lawmakers having sex with underage kids has led them to have an Israel first policy.
…More explicitly than after the first ban
It’s like people forgot about that.
If I was in the USA, I would be ready to run real quick. The crackdown on the left is just beginning, get ready for massive surveillance, fully controlled media, reeducation camps, etc. GAFAM are all bending to the dictator. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when and how.
lol bruh the state erased the left like 80 years ago.
IDK, what's happening now has nothing to do with the usual capitalist propaganda and brainwashing of the past decades. I agree most of the west hasn't seen any real left govern states since the end of the 70s, but at then pace things are going and unless something huge happens, I guarantee you will soon look at the past years as some decent times
A lot of us are too poor to get out. Don't think Canada is taking political refugees just yet :/
I'm Canadian and I don't feel safe either. It's a new era of global fascism and surveillance, most of us wont be safe anywhere. Call me paranoid, but I'm already working on a escape and I wont ever disclose details online. Crazy times.
I'm just hoping we don't get to the point where I feel compelled to leave.
In the meantime, I'm looking for parts of the world where I could live for an extended period of time in case the worst happens. I don't think we'll get there, but it's always good to have a backup plan.
There was never a left in USA, buddy.
Oh right, thanks. So everyone's fine with the current administration I guess. My bad and good luck the pedo-dictatorship.
I think only you are fine with the dictatorship.
Myself and most of my family are fleeing next week, and I’m still worried that this infection will spread to where we’re going. They want this to be global.
Shout-out to every dumbass that thought just because that bill to give the president to unilaterally designate companies as foreign companies national security threats and ban them was being passed during a democratic party Presidency, that meant the ACLU and EFF were wrong and this was actually a good thing. The most popular easily abusable legislation of the past ten years.
Don't support government powers that you wouldn't want your opposition to possess. They will be in power someday, bet on that no matter what. Especially stupid stupid after 2020 Portland federal law enforcement disappearing people it should have been clear that the powers of the executive should have been limited before it was going to inevitably be in the power of opposition again but nope, Tiktok bad because China makes us feel insecure.
Stupid bill and stupid people that were, I know ACLU and EFF are against it but TikTok needs to be banned, dumbasses - a bill can be written that targets a single company rather than a blanket power to block out any company from that selection of countries. Of course now that it is law, a willing congress - an inevitability - can remove the country specifics or add any and for some reason dumbasses after 2020 were like - it won't be abused
And the reason the Democrats and Republicans wanted to kill Tick Tock was Israel. Because we have an Israel first policy just because they have video footage of our lawmakers having sex with kids and their business Pals as well.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmakers-tiktok-ban-pro-palestinian-content-1235016101/
Always remember
It is being sold to Larry Ellison, one of the biggest donors to Israel. So you bet TikTok is going to be filled with IDF thirst trap propaganda soon.
Soon? Its been for a while now.
"Converted into a Propaganda mill" my ass... What is it now if not a Propaganda mill
It's currently a propaganda refinery.
Ya when I learned the Chinese have a different algorithm for NA I automatically didn't trust it.
They had to get a different algo and server infra under Trump I and Biden because they were threatening it back then on grounds that they would spy on american's data. They proceeded to start deranking anything political during the 2020 protests and hiring former spooks to moderate content, but that was never going to be enough.
I would make a joke if this wasn't deeply, deeply worrying.
This is how the Nazis solidify support in genZ and genAlpha.
America is fucked.
A lot more than America becomes fucked when tiktok becomes owned by these guys. It'll become their global platform to radicalize youth Nazis from one corner of the globe to another. Time to hope the youth outside America are smart enough to see thorough this, but if our recent Canadian election was any indication then they are not.
I agree, but this is just tiktok in America. Everywhere else, users remain on the global version.
'America is fucked' because this comes alongside everything else - control of the media, control of all branches of government, building the paramilitary Gestapo (ICE) etc. The whole western world is at risk but America is further down the road.
Wdym by that last part?
Nazi content is already insanely popular on tiktok. There is Minecraft edits with slogans like "take back the west" and a sonnenrad in the background getting millions of views. Nick Funetes an open Nazi does numbers.
The platform is a cesspit and can't get any worse.
I remember when Rupert Murdoch's company, News Corporation, bought Myspace. Maybe US TikTok will see the same fate
It will lose its luster when there is a noticeable political slant.
Tiktok's popularity is already going downhill, so it checks out.
Ok, but didn't they buy Myspace when it was already getting less popular and a lot of people had switched to Facebook?
Isn’t it already a propaganda mill?
Well you had to ask, right? Not anymore.
Touché
Betteridge you bastard how dare you fail me like this
When the state is worried about "foreign" surveillance, propaganda, etc., it's really just worried that it's not doing the surveillance, propaganda, etc.
Gen z and younger are consumers of tiktok. It's important for conservative parties to shore up their future bases. We already saw effective other platforms were
Gonna be sold to Oracle. Which means sold to the CIA.
Ooh! Who gets to be Goebbels?
Not the guy with the hole in his neck.
Wait what if I got a time machine
Either Tucker Carlson or Alex Jones, whoever doesn't get shot
It keeps going until we stop it folks. The adults are no longer in the room.
How does this work for countries outside of the US? Will Canadian and European TikTok get the propaganda too or will the US version be self contained?
The US... Self contained..
I read that US users will have to download a whole new app so I’m guessing anyone outside the US that keeps the current one won’t be affected.
So like the tiktok China has. It's like we are running full speed trying to become NK
It will be a shadow of his former self being run by these hacks. There are two greedy and short-sighted to run a growing platform.
Don't underestimate the stupidity and calcification of tiktok users, they'll just stick around having never heard of the sale. They won't even question why their feed is now a nonstop loop of Kirk clips.
Yes and no. The people that were driving content on there we'll leave the site, it will be like a dead Internet site, half wits interacting with Bots and AI. The people that drove interaction on that site, say by criticizing Israel's bullshit, will leave, which was half the reason they attacked the site in the first place. God forbid Americans disagree with their leaders about Israel just because those leaders are on video fucking underage children that Israel has in their possession.
They literally started attacking TikTok because TikTokers are too "woke" (aka anti-genocide).
The real dummies are the people who join fascists in attacking them with garbage stereotypes, etc.
I can't wait to see zoomers burn down the Whitehouse
What? I'm not sure how it is in the US but in many countries zoomers (men) are very right wing. These are the guys that watch rogan and Andrew Tate.
All these kids and their tikkity toks and instant grams
When Tiktok was taken offline for 24 hours and it's users noted that it "came back wrong" with suggestions for certain things missing for American users, we should've listened.
It already started.
And that was literally the Chinese government who made that call. Not even really to do with the US law change or anything. They were throwing a tantrum and it came with an added bonus of "censorship".
My guess is only ~15% of people using TikTok will quit, because of this.
Drugs are bad kids, m'kay?
@sp3ctr4l @vegeta look how many people still use Twitter.
I literally only ever had a twitter account... when Elon announced he was buying it, and I created that account soley in order to scream at him untill I was banned, probably by him personally.
All these short form, highly algorithmically manipulated communication platforms have given everyone brainrot, ruined their attention spans, made everyone angry stupid and tribal, and spread astounding amounts of mis and disinformation.
It was all downhill after Facebook introduced Farmville, and fully realized that every aspect of the human psyche can be gamified and manipulated.
If you do not realize that persistent exposure to a dopamine delivery device has fucked up nearly everyone on a fundamental level, and has created addiction/withdrawal behaviors in a large subset of those people, particularly if they've been exposed since a young age, you are either an addict in denial yourself, or you have not read enough of the studies on this.
I'd even go so far as to say it's a dual-dopamine-plus-cortisol device. For as many things on the internet that give people joy, there are probably as many if not more things that make people angry. And the algorithms are very good and pressing both buttons simultaneously (the meme of a superhero sweating looking at two buttons need not apply).
Yes, I was oversimplifying a bit.
It is also cortisol... it is so many other things.
A little bit of everything, all of the time, perfectly optimized to exaggerate whatever tendencies or interests you have into a targetted, pigeonholed exaggeration.
It destroys the capacity for critical thought, reduces everything to inter and intra group, micro or macro politics...
And all of it... ostensibly, to sell fucking ads.
Its already turning into Ziotok
Is that z as in Zionism or gen-z or ruzzia? Or a little bit of all
Yes.
Both. Both is bad.
Suuuuuuure. I'll believe it when I...actually probably never.
Nice, another of those shit platforms nobody needs is dead.
Zionist supremacist oligarchs who are heavily involved in election financing in cooperation with Israel Lobby that directly manages loyalty oaths to Israel from every Federally elected official. Zionists supremacists shifted heavily to Trump this cycle, with DNC funding paying them to lose for the most Zionist supremacist election outcome.
Media bending over backwards to not call it what it is, is clear and direct result of bipartisan submission to ZIonist supremacism.
Proof that this purchase is entirely to enforce Zionist supremacism, is that this group will overpay with licensing fees in order to add their layer of censorship on opposition to genocide, and humanizing people resisting genocide and supremacism. The buyers don't care about making money from purchase, and will be proven by deal structure.
As backdrop on Larry Ellison, his wealth grew over $100B last week on the most fraudulent BS in the history of finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-openai-300-billion-deal-150815377.html
Open AI, who loses money on $10B in annual revenue, has promised (non binding) Oracle $60B/year for GPU/datacenter services for next 5 years. Oracle has yet to even think about how it would fulfill this revenue, and Open AI has no way whatsoever of paying for it. Open AI models are not particularly cost/quality competitive relative to Anthropic (or Gemini/llama) or Deepseek/other Chinese open models. OpenAI's future and this Oracle contract, depends on it getting the US military contract for Skynet.
Should you short Oracle in the face of this? Of course not! Zionist supremacist oligarchs in the US are the chosen people, and above criticism.
The title feels misinformative to me given, the following from the article:
To me, the title infers that TikTok is being sold with certainty, whereas the content of the article sates that a deal has yet to even be reached.
::: spoiler References
Converted, huh. It's not already there?
So it'll be the same but maybe a little more america based?
I don't think sharing such biased media is useful
It's pretty useful to own all the media though. Which the right wing do in fact own.
knowing trump is pissed off at many media, i'm not so sure about this
Anyways, any obviously biased media is close to useless to me
There are always biases though? I'm having trouble understanding why you find obviously biased media less useful. The more obvious the bias, the easier to boil it down to facts, no?
I prefer making my own opinion of things. Consuming biased media will make me think a specific view is the truth, but there can be more to it
Biased media makes you think an opinion is the truth, and that's dangerous for your critical thinking abilities
I disagree. Critical thinking abilities are the antidote to thinking an opinion is the truth.
Illiterate medieval serf with no critical thinking abilities: "it is written, therefore it must be true"
Vs.
Modern, educated person subjected to gigabytes of information at their fingertips: "I'll need to see a primary source for the info in this video because it looks like this YouTuber might have an axe to grind"
See ya all on RedNote, I guess.
Red Note. You can say what you like about the USA, but you can’t criticize China or show skin.
The future is navigating through a variety of fascist apps trying to avoid various camps.
Red Note is cool in that it does give you more perspective, interacting more directly with the people of China over what is said about the country as a whole.
It’s not my thing and neither is TikTok. I’ve downloaded neither.