Commentary, Cato Litangen, head of Mimeta.
(Based on generative AI tools and retrieval-augumented real time data search)
On January 22, 2026, TikTok closed a deal, Politico reported it at $14 billion, that handed American control of its platform to a consortium led by Larry Ellison's Oracle, Silver Lake Partners, and MGX, an Abu Dhabi state investment fund. ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, retained just under 20%. The White House called it a national security win. The actual story is messier, and it matters for anyone trying to document what's happening in Gaza, the West Bank, or anywhere else a U.S. ally wants to disappear from digital view.
Starting with what we know about the people now sitting at TikTok's board table. Ellison has funnelled over $26 million to Friends of the Israel Defence Forces since 2014, including a $16.6 million donation in 2017 that holds the record for the largest single gift in FIDF's history. That money funds IDF facilities, welfare programs, and training for the military conducting operations in Gaza and the West Bank. Ellison offered Netanyahu an Oracle board seat worth approximately $450,000 annually plus stock options; Netanyahu declined, but vacationed with Ellison's family on his Hawaiian island. This isn't just political alignment, it's a personal relationship built on substantial financial commitment.
When you try to document a genocide, the design of the algorithm decide you're spam.
MGX is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's national security adviser and brother of the UAE president. The fund is state-controlled, legally classified as an Emirati government entity. In March 2025, MGX used Trump's family stablecoin, USD1, to invest $2 billion in Binance. According to Trump's financial disclosures filed in June 2025, he personally received $57.4 million in income from World Liberty Financial in the project's first year. His family entity holds 60% of World Liberty Financial and receives 75% of net revenue from token sales and stablecoin profits after operating costs. A Senate resolution in May 2025 raised Foreign Emoluments concerns about this direct revenue stream from a foreign government to a sitting president. By the end of 2025, the Trump family had profited roughly $390 million from World Liberty Financial token sales alone, according to Bloomberg's analysis.
So, the ownership structure of TikTok US is now: a billionaire who bankrolls Israel's military, a state fund from a country that criminalizes dissent and tortures prisoners, and, if not in a formal ownership position, Trump's family, which is directly profiting from the Emirati government's investment choices. Trump signed an executive order blessing this as proof TikTok would be "majority owned and controlled by the United States." The math is technically correct. The politics are unavoidable.
Why Congress Really Wanted TikTok Sold
The official justification was national security, fear that Beijing could access American data or manipulate the algorithm. TikTok, however, offered to store U.S. data on Oracle's servers and allow third-party audits. The Justice Department rejected it anyway. But there's a more honest version of this story: by October and November 2023, members of Congress were explicitly targeting TikTok over its Gaza coverage.
After October 7, 2023, TikTok became something unprecedented in American media. Palestinian voices reached tens of millions of young Americans in real time, unfiltered and unmediated with videos of destroyed neighbourhoods, casualty reports, solidarity marches, the texture of life under occupation. The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2023 that hashtags related to the conflict on TikTok showed massive engagement, with platforms' content becoming central to how younger generations consumed news about the war. Senator Josh Hawley explicitly cited "anti-Israel content" as a reason to ban the app. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in November 2023, Hawley wrote that "analysts have attributed" the disparity in younger Americans' support of Palestine compared to older generations "to the ubiquity of anti-Israel content on TikTok." Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers led a November 2023 letter signed by 25 House Republicans demanding TikTok CEO Shou Chew take action to combat what they called "terrorist propaganda and antisemitic content," noting that the hashtag #freepalestine received 946 million views in a 30-day period, with over half from young adults aged 18 to 24.
In November 2023, forty corporate executives, many from the tech sector, met with TikTok CEO Shou Chew to complain about pro-Palestinian content on the platform. Anthony Goldbloom, one of the most vocal participants, accused TikTok of promoting antisemitism, claiming that for every view of pro-Israel videos there were 54 views for pro-Palestinian videos. The marketing campaign TikTok launched in December titled "Swipe Out Hate" was too late to assuage critics.
The national security framing was the acceptable vessel for a narrative control operation. Nobody could have been surprised when the deal that finally closed, put Israel-aligned figures in charge.
Meta's Campaign Against Palestinian Speech
Before examining what TikTok might do, it's crucial to understand what Meta has already done, as the same legal architecture that protected Meta's choices will now protect TikTok's.
Between October and November 2023, Human Rights Watch documented over 1,050 cases of removed, suspended, or suppressed content on Facebook and Instagram targeting peaceful posts about Palestine. Of 1,050 English-language takedowns HRW reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful pro-Palestine content. One involved Israel support. Phrases like "Ceasefire Now" and "Stop the Genocide" were flagged as spam and removed. Posts reporting casualty figures from Gaza's Ministry of Health, content from Arabic news outlets like TRT Arabi, and documentation of Israeli airstrikes on hospitals, all disappeared under Meta's "dangerous individuals and organizations" policy, which was designed to block terrorist content, but got weaponized to silence reporting and political speech.
The mechanism was systematic. In April 2025, DropSite News obtained internal Meta data showing that since October 7, 2023, Meta complied with 94% of takedown requests from the Israeli government. The data, verified by multiple independent sources inside Meta, shows Meta removed over 90,000 posts to comply with Israeli government takedown requests in an average of 30 seconds. Israeli requests went through a special exemption: Meta took down posts without human review, while still feeding that data back into Meta's AI system to train future content moderation. This is unusual, government takedown requests typically receive human moderator review rather than AI-only processing.
The whistleblower data also shows Meta significantly expanded automated takedowns since October 7, resulting in an estimated 38.8 million additional posts being "actioned upon" (removed, banned, or suppressed) across Facebook and Instagram since late 2023. When concerns about overenforcement against pro-Palestinian content were raised inside Meta's Integrity Organization, sources told DropSite that leadership responded by saying they preferred to overenforce against potentially violating content rather than underenforce and risk leaving violating content live.
The result: tens of millions of posts suppressed, accounts suspended, creators' livelihoods disrupted. Palestinian journalists in Gaza had their Instagram accounts disabled mid-documentation. Their reach was artificially suppressed without notification. There was no systematic way to appeal. The company that silenced them insisted it was exercising editorial discretion protected by the First Amendment.
The Legal Shield
This is where the architecture becomes important. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, shields platforms from liability for user-generated content and explicitly protects their editorial choices to remove content they find objectionable. In Moody v. NetChoice (2024), the Supreme Court held that when platforms "remove, alter, organize, prioritize, or disclaim posts" in their feeds, they're making "editorial judgments" that receive First Amendment protection. The Court ruled that state restrictions on content moderation "trigger First Amendment scrutiny" because platforms are "making expressive choices" when they compile and curate third-party speech.
This creates a nearly impenetrable legal position: platforms can't be sued for hosting user content, can't be forced to carry speech they dislike, and can resist government transparency mandates on First Amendment grounds. When California and New York passed laws requiring platforms to disclose their content moderation practices, X sued both states. A federal appellate panel blocked California's law in 2024. The message: Platforms claim near-total discretion, shielded by constitutional and statutory immunity, whenever regulators try to look inside.
This discretion vanishes, though, the moment the regulator is European. The European Union's Digital Services Act, which took effect in 2023, requires large platforms to assess risks to civic discourse, provide transparency on moderation, and give researchers access to data. In December 2025, the European Commission fined X €120 million: €45 million for selling verification blue ticks that destroyed account authenticity, €35 million for opacity on targeted advertising, €40 million for blocking researchers' access to data on views and engagement. This was the first DSA fine ever issued.
The U.S. response was telling. When European regulators use legal tools to demand transparency and mitigate harms to civic discourse., exactly the kind of accountability that might have caught Meta's suppression of Gaza documentation, U.S. officials framed it as foreign interference with free speech. The coherence isn't about free expression; it's about power and alignment.
What TikTok US May Do
TikTok's new owners now have the same legal immunity Meta enjoys. They can suppress what they find objectionable and cite editorial autonomy if anyone objects. If TikTok quietly down-ranks posts critical of the UAE, of Israeli policy, or of Trump administration actions, there's virtually no legal recourse. The platform could argue those are legitimate editorial choices protected as its own speech under Moody. If Congress tried to mandate transparency, requiring TikTok to disclose how often it removes content at government request, or how its algorithm treats posts about Palestine, the platform could sue on First Amendment grounds. Section 230 immunizes them from being sued by users whose Gaza documentation gets removed.
The setup is designed to keep editorial power concentrated, unaccountable, and in private hands. It works just fine when those hands are ideologically and financially aligned with U.S. state interests.
For artists and activists, the stakes are immediate. A spoken-word artist in Ramallah posting about daily life under occupation, a diaspora organizer in Dearborn using TikTok to fundraise for Gaza relief, a documentary filmmaker in Jenin sharing footage of settler violence, their visibility on the platform now depends on the editorial discretion of a board that includes MGX's chief strategy officer and executives from a company whose co-founder bankrolls the IDF. There's no transparency requirement, no right to appeal, no obligation to disclose how many videos are removed at the request of the Israeli Cyber Unit or the UAE's security apparatus.
The UAE Problem People Aren't Talking About Enough
It's not just Ellison's FIDF donations or Trump's stablecoin scheme. MGX represents direct state control over content policy for 200 million American users, and the UAE's human rights record is extensively documented.
The UAE criminalizes peaceful dissent and restricts freedom of expression, association, and assembly using broad terrorism, cybercrime, and national security laws. According to Human Rights Watch's April 2024 report on the UAE84 trial, authorities conducted a mass trial against 84 activists, academics, and reformers in 2023 and 2024. Defendants included people arrested years earlier and held beyond their sentences. The trial involved coerced confessions, secret hearings, denial of fair trial guarantees, and torture allegations. Multiple defendants testified to being held in solitary confinement without beds, running water, or basic sanitation, subjected to psychological torture including forced loud music during interrogations. At least 44 of the 84 defendants were sentenced to lengthy prison terms in mass hearings.
Ahmed Mansoor, an engineer and internationally respected human rights defender, has been detained since 2017. In December 2025, the Swedish Human Rights Committee appealed for his release, noting he remains imprisoned despite completing his sentence. The U.S. Congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission maintains a profile on Mansoor documenting his arbitrary detention and treatment in custody.
The UAE uses advanced digital surveillance to monitor residents, activists, and visitors. Migrant workers, who make up a majority of the UAE's population, face systematic abuses under the kafala labor system, wage theft, passport confiscation, unsafe conditions, obstacles to changing employers. Trade unions are banned. There's no non-discriminatory minimum wage.
This is the government now holding a 15% stake and a board seat in TikTok US, with decision-making authority over content policy for a platform used by Americans who have demonstrated the strongest opposition to Israeli military actions in Gaza.
The Artist's Trap
The legal architecture concentrates power, removes accountability, and deploys selectively depending on who's speaking and what they're saying. The rhetoric of free speech is loudest when platforms resist European transparency rules or when the U.S. state defends American tech giants from foreign regulators. It goes silent when Meta suppresses content about Gaza at the direct request of the Israeli government, or when TikTok's algorithm is handed to a consortium led by Netanyahu's personal friend and an authoritarian monarchy that imprisons activists for posting.
The First Amendment and Section 230 don't protect speakers. They protect platforms and, by extension, the political and economic interests aligned with those platforms. For the 200 million people scrolling TikTok this morning, the app looks and feels identical to Tuesday. The difference is the boardroom, the bank accounts, and the quiet understanding that some speech is more protected than others.
When you try to document a genocide, the algorithm might just decide you're spam.
References:
Politico (Jan 22, 2026): "Deal for US ownership of TikTok is closed, company says" - $14 billion valuation[politico]
NPR (Jan 22, 2026): "TikTok finalizes deal to form new American entity"[npr]
New York Times (Jan 22, 2026): "Here's Who Just Bought TikTok" - ownership percentages and board composition[nytimes]
Silicon Republic (Jan 22, 2026): "TikTok signs U.S. JV deal with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX"[siliconrepublic]
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Bloomberg (Dec 18, 2025): "TikTok Says It Signed Agreements for New US Joint Venture"[bloomberg]
InfluenceWatch (Dec 15, 2025): "Larry Ellison" - $26 million total donations since 2014, $16.6 million in 2017[influencewatch]
One Path Network (Dec 11, 2025): "The Zionist Tech Billionaire that Now Owns Your Data"[onepathnetwork]
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Forbes (June 14, 2025): "Trump Made $57.4 Million From World Liberty Financial in Recent Months" - personal income disclosure[forbes]
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Wikipedia (Jan 4, 2020, updated): "Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan (national security advisor)" - biography, UAE role[en.wikipedia]
Futurism (Jan 23, 2025): "Trump's $500 Billion AI Deal Includes Funding by UAE Royal Family" - MGX leadership and Stargate involvement[futurism]
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DW (Dec 5, 2025): "EU hits X with €120 million fine over breaking digital rules" - €45M verification, €35M advertising, €40M researcher access breakdown[dw]
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Amnesty International referenced in GCHR and Swedish Human Rights Committee materials
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