President Trump’s 2025 brokered TikTok sale and moving it to on the ground US operations is silencing free expression online, with video blogging platform’s algorithm already disproportionately demoting and limiting reach of any Palestinian content, according to Northeastern University research.
The research analyzed millions of posts and found that content using hashtags such as #FreePalestine and #Gaza received very low view counts and engagement compared to other political topics.
Insiders and Palestinians rights activists contend that this aggressive suppression – fused with Oracle Larry Ellison’s new ownership’s political pressures – have effectively silenced the one of only digital arena for Palestinians solidarity.
TikTok’s new US leadership and operations have made the platform a centralized control of public discourse on a global scale.
Masked as a detrimental national security problem, the US government’s forced TikTok sale exposed how bipartisan lawmakers – pressured by pro-Israel lobbyists like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – transformed a data privacy debate into a calculated plan to foundationally reconstruct public opinion on Israeli’s war on Gaza, and its annexation of the West Bank.
The campaign was never about protecting American users from Chinese surveillance. It was about controlling narratives.
“They are not trying to ban TikTok. They are trying to use government power to pro-Israel ownership to silence criticism of genocide and apartheid,” said Human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber.
The push against TikTok ownership intensified after the October 7, 2023, Israel’s devastating attacks on Gaza, which fueled a global outrage. Young users turned to the platform to share on ground footage, educate the world about the exact events taking place, and express solidarity with Palestinians, angering Washington and Tel Aviv alike.
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called it a “TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem,” while Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi admitted, “October 7 really opened people’s eyes to what’s happening on TikTok.” The result was a bipartisan bill signed by President Joe Biden in April 2024, forcing TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to have the TikTok sell within 270 days or face a nationwide ban.
The Sweaty Oracle TikTok Acquisition
By 2025, when President Trump came to his reign, he announced a $14 billion TikTok sale through a group of American investors, including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The selection of these billionaire, really just says it all on the direction President Trump is taking to guarantee the utter silence of online voices that don’t echo the same beliefs as his administration and his royal court. The selection of these figures is what defines the future of digital dissent.
Ellison’s loyalty to the power occupying the Palestinian lands, and his support to Israel TikTok audience is not hidden.
As journalist Sam Husseini reported that Ellison “speaks at Israeli military galas as though he were an Israeli citizen.”
Ellison himself declared that they “have two CEOs at Oracle. One’s name is Safra Catz, and she was born in Israel. So again, we love the country of Israel and will do everything we can to support the country of Israel.”
The Electronic Intifada exposed Dell Technologies’ role in supporting Israel’s AI powered killing programs “Lavender” and “The Gospel.” With Murdoch’s right-wing media empire and Ellison’s new TikTok algorithm change and data, critics warn that the platform’s independence and its users’ freedom of expression are under siege.
Ellison once predicted a world of total surveillance, saying, “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
Some users online ask whether the TikTok algorithm changed due to Oracle’s role in the TikTok sale, and for accuracy purposes, there’s much more nuanced reality to the situation.
After the Trump-era executive orders, Oracle’s role was to host US user data on its cloud infrastructure and deliver security oversight to the government, under “national security” pretenses.
So, now, with the TikTok sale under Trump 2.0, Oracle is not really changing the recipe – algorithm – but it’s basically taking complete control over the kitchen – data environment.
Oracle sole purpose with TikTok is that it ensures the data safely transferred and the algorithm’s following its published recipe without any secret from the US government.
Of course, now we know that the comprehensive data collection conduct that the US government was so eager to indulge after 9/11, under the Bush Junior’s administration, were another piece of the puzzle that gave the US government total control over its own citizens’ data.
It’s kind of the same data Ellison is collecting for the comprehensive citizen surveillance operations these companies are planning in collab with the US government.
But that’s a story for another day.
Did the TikTok Algorithm Change to Protect Israel?
Even as pro-Palestinian voices remain strong online, evidence suggests the algorithm is shifting. Northeastern University researcher Laura Edelson found that “for every pro-Israel post that appeared on TikTok in September, there were roughly 17 posts supporting Palestinians.”
The last of US TikTok puzzle incidents had the users notice key phrases like “free Palestine” being flagged as hate speech.
A leaked US State Department memo obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein quoted Israeli diplomat Emmanuel Nahshon saying, “the Tik-Tok algorithm favours pro-Palestinian content.”
The remark shows how Israel’s anxiety over losing influence among Gen Z audiences, hence the TikTok sale that had been going on for some time now. Senator Mark Warner later admitted that TikTok restrictions gained momentum only after people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform highlighting a difference in Chinese TikTok operations not like US TikTok operations when it comes to the algorithm.
Republican Mitt Romney echoed this concern, claiming, “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians… it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.
With Trump TikTok sale buyer from Oracle now overseeing TikTok’s US data and AI systems alongside its $300 billion cloud deal with OpenAI Washington’s “national security” argument increasingly looks like cover for political TikTok censorship words.
In truth, the TikTok sale controversy was never about protecting users. It was about controlling narratives and deciding whose TikTok algorithm point system is allowed to tell their own version of the truth rather than the solid truth.