Transcription
All right. So, TikTok, a horrible application collecting obscene amounts of data with addictive dopamine loops, has recently finalized a divestiture wherein the US-based portion of the social media platform has been sold off to a collection of domestic investors. It's called the TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. And when it finally happened, basically everyone freaked out about it. The whole thing is a bit of a carnival, to be honest.
For about six years now, there's been a sort of tug-of-war effort to ban the application in the United States. But after flip-flopping back and forth over and over repeatedly, instead of suspending the service by presidential order, the platform was sold off to a collection of different companies, including Oracle, a cloud computing firm in charge of data protection and the new TikTok algorithm, Silverlake, an investment group holding 15%, and MGX, basically another version of Silverlake based out of Abu Dhabi. The full consortium has a whole lot more parties involved, but today I want to talk about the deal, the panic, the reactions, and basically pick apart why the entire thing is a complete shitshow and why most people who are actually concerned about it don't even appear to be concerned for the correct reasons.
Let's start with a very basic explanation of what happened and why a pretty hefty number of users are just now, for the very first time, paying attention to something that was already true for quite a while. TikTok has always had extremely invasive, predatory data tracking policies. It's not that dissimilar from Facebook or Twitter or Instagram in that regard. But the sad fact of the matter is that most people just don't care. However, as a result of the governance shift where TikTok is now controlled by a new set of companies and investors, that type of invasive policy is being put under a microscope. And it's not happening in a vacuum. There's some pretty strong political winds blowing right now which are dramatically increasing the level of scrutiny.
I want to make something abundantly clear right now. TikTok was originally banned from being installed on government devices in the United States because the concern, the primary concern, was that the application gathers far too much data from the host phone. This right here is the actual memorandum from February 2023 under the Biden administration. But the TikTok ban saga goes even further back than that. In 2020, during his first term, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13942, flatly prohibiting transactions between US firms and TikTok parent company ByteDance, which was set to effectively remove the application from US markets entirely. So, when I say that this isn't a partisan issue, I hope that everyone can accept that as a fact.
Anyway, the concern is data collection under a Chinese company, which is honestly somewhat valid. But after flip-flopping back and forth on the issue with the White House eventually asking a bunch of technology companies to please step in and assume control of TikTok domestically, after they finally made up their mind as ownership of the platform changed hands officially, all of its users in the United States were given a repeat terms of service disclosure which they had to agree to, else they couldn't use the application. Just to get something out of the way right now and rip the band-aid off, I guess most of these terms remain unchanged. Most of the items that people are losing their minds over were always like that. They just didn't know or didn't care. But after a multi-year saga of threats, bans, and sanctions, the stone-cold fact here is that TikTok isn't gathering less data about its users. It's gathering more, with the only functional change being who it ultimately answers to.
Let's actually take a look at a few of these terms. Quote, "Information we collect. Information you provide may include sensitive personal information as defined under applicable state privacy laws, such as information from users under the relevant age threshold, information you disclose in survey responses or in your user content about your racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or non-binary, citizenship or immigration status (that's a big one), or financial information. For example, we may process your financial information in order to provide you the goods or services you request from us or your driver's license number in order to verify your identity. We may also collect precise location data depending on your settings and as explained below. We process such sensitive personal information in accordance with applicable law, such as for permitted purposes under the California Consumer Privacy Act." End quote.
By the way, they also collect things such as what's on your clipboard, whatever you're trying to copy and paste, even if it doesn't have to do with the application necessarily. They can collect your social media contacts, your phone contacts, all your private messages, basically everything. Okay, TikTok scans everything. Once again, most of that data collection policy was already true, hence the concern about banning it previously for a multitude of years. But now, now we have a very different political atmosphere and a very different set of investors. This is where we need context.
All right. Immigration is an extremely divisive political issue in the United States right now. Honestly, what's happening with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the law enforcement agency, is one of the most incendiary trends I've ever seen in this country during my lifetime. Whether or not someone agrees with the stated mission of ICE as an agency, regardless of personal politics, if you were to consider the agency as military, it would have the fourth highest funding budget of any military in the world. The point of this video isn't to argue for or against ICE as an agency. Personally, I'm very much against a whole lot of what they're doing right now, but far beyond any sort of personal stance, what I'm trying to show is the reason why a lot of people are concerned about TikTok. Bear with me, okay?
ICE, originally reported on by 404 Media and now echoed all over the internet elsewhere, is seeking to employ a system called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, which is a sort of map drawing on information from the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, which also includes Medicaid, by the way, for the purpose of identifying potential deportation targets. A lot of people may be thinking, what does that have to do with TikTok? So let's keep going because that system, ELITE, made for identifying targets, is being constructed by a company, a software company called Palantir, which is now heavily integrated all across the United States government agencies, law enforcement, military, you name it. With me so far?
TikTok gathers data such as immigration status. With the recent change in ownership, people are now seeing this mandatory ToS agreement before using the application. Immigration itself is a very hot-button political topic in the United States broadly speaking, and all of this while a turbo-charged law enforcement agency, that being ICE, works with Palantir to find more deportation targets. That's the stage, so to speak, setting the stage.
But the icing on the cake, or the third act if you will, is that Oracle, in direct control as per TikTok's new terms, direct control of data protection for the platform. Oracle has a deep strategic partnership with Palantir. Hopefully, the picture is becoming clear because TikTok is not gathering less data than it did under Chinese control. It's gathering more. Except now it's gathering that data under the umbrella of a company which is deeply connected to Palantir and, by extension, associated with tools that are being used by ICE for the profiling and deportation of immigrants. That is where the controversy initially comes from. But it's also not everything.
Oracle is owned by one of the richest men in the world. Actually, briefly, he dethroned Elon Musk as the richest man in the world on paper, at least. His name is Larry Ellison. And again, not to make the video too political, he's a staunch ally of the current administration. He once hosted a six-figure buy-in campaign event on his property for Donald Trump. He donates tens of millions of dollars, often through a particular action committee, ironically called Opportunity Matters. He donates tens of millions of dollars across the conservative party, including current figures like Secretary of State Marco Rubio. And he does this while snapping up various different companies such as CBS and even potentially the parent company of CNN, if he gets his way, turning himself into a new-age media mogul. The idea that billionaires are controlling our lives has never been more true than it is right now today. And at the very same time, people are suddenly confronted by the same sort of predatory data harvesting agreement that they've willingly accepted for years. Only this time, the political temperature is through the roof.
How about another issue, one that's even more relevant when you consider the type of videos I've recently produced, and that is Epstein. Let's keep something in mind. In December of 2025, the DOJ, the Department of Justice, was lawfully ordered by Congress and signed off by the president. They were lawfully ordered to release the Epstein files. December 19th was the deadline for that with as little redactions as possible, as per the law. They just didn't do it. Full stop. In total, they released something like one or 2% of the files. They massively over-redacted practically everything, and then they just stopped. The DOJ is openly, flagrantly violating the law and refusing to release the files. But then somehow, coincidentally, after control of TikTok gets handed to a company that's owned by a political ally of the current administration, suddenly the word Epstein starts getting censored. There's a lot of videos now showcasing that when using the word Epstein in a direct message, the message won't send, showing a community guidelines violation notice instead. And while I wasn't able to replicate this myself, I don't have a TikTok account at all personally, but I asked a few people that do and they weren't able to replicate it either. Even if I wasn't able to recreate that notice myself, there's enough examples, by far more than enough examples out there, proving that to some degree, the word Epstein was specifically being flagged and censored. This came during a spree of other issues as well, such as videos getting zero views and the algorithm being all messed up, which TikTok now claims was a result of a data center outage. But I'm finding it incredibly hard to believe that while the administration is actively covering up the Epstein files and breaking the law to stop them from coming out, with a staunch political ally assuming direct control of TikTok data security, suddenly TikTok censors the word Epstein. Yeah, I'm finding that a little bit impossible to accept as a mere coincidence.
I think a lot of people right now are concerned for some of the wrong reasons. TikTok has always had invasive data collection practices. There's nothing new with that. But a more important figure is looking at what they're willing to hand over to third parties or authorities. Even before the change in control, TikTok had a standing policy that they will subjectively hand over pretty much whatever the government asks for in "limited emergency situations." Big air quotes around that. But who defines "emergency" in these cases? As per their own disclosures, from 2019 to 2025, the number of granted law enforcement disclosures increased by more than 100 times. What do we realistically think is going to happen here when instead of a Chinese company harvesting all of your data for illicit purposes, now it's an American company harvesting even more of your data for illicit purposes? One of those is a long-standing public outcry, a worthy threat to national security, so they say, but the other is perfectly fine. No, it's not. And right now, a lot of people are being forced to confront the fact that the American government isn't necessarily default good when it comes to technology control and surveillance.
Anecdotally, a massive number of people are now claiming targeted political suppression on the platform. And maybe some of it's wrong or exaggerated or the result of a data center issue, as TikTok now claims. Who knows? But one thing is abundantly clear, and that is the lack of reform. Because the transition of TikTok from a Chinese-owned application to a consortium-owned US application has changed absolutely none of the core issues it was supposed to change.
Meanwhile, a TikTok competitor called Upscrolled has catapulted all the way to the number two slot on daily app downloads purely as a result of people waking up to the reality of how invasive the data collection on social media actually is. I don't think this particular application will dethrone TikTok, not by a long shot, but it's a testament to the fact that when the time is right, when the political winds align, and when there's reason enough to care beyond the sort of ethereal implications of "they're tracking what I do," which unfortunately sometimes doesn't seem to matter on the surface to hardly anyone, in a situation where all of these factors coincidentally align, people genuinely seem to wake up and care, which is what's appearing to happen right now on TikTok.
The TikTok disaster isn't actually anything new. It's just a realignment of which government is harvesting your data and what they're using it for, which also happens to come during a perfect storm of political backlash, giving people an adequate reason to care about something that they should have always cared about. At the end of the day, I'm certainly not angry about that fact. It's an undeniable good thing that people are reading these terms and saying, "Well, wait a second. That's not good at all." But some of this stuff has been objectively bad since the very first time it showed up in a terms agreement, and it's been a long time since that happened.
Get this. Okay. From the current TikTok consumer health data policy. Quote, "We may collect information from and about you, including information that you provide, automatically collected information, and information from other sources." And then further down, "Information about your physical and mental health conditions that you or others choose to provide in the content that you create or upload through the services. For example, you or others may provide such information if you compose, send, or receive messages through the services' messaging functionalities, create or post non-public user content discussing a recent illness, or search for information about an illness or condition through the services' search function." End quote.
Simplified. Okay. They'll scan all of your messages and everything else you upload to identify health-related information among many other things so that they can use it on and off platform for advertising and selling and God knows what else. This has always been true. It's not even a new policy, but the level of alarm we're finally seeing, thankfully, is approaching the level it should have been at way back in the beginning when Facebook did it, or Instagram, or Twitter, or anyone else.
Bottom line, TikTok is receiving a strong dose of rightfully deserved backlash after changing hands at the conclusion of a multi-year saga where "we should ban this for safety reasons" turned into "we should just do everything that they were doing and more to our own citizens." That's basically what happened.
Anyway, that's it. If you want to support the channel, check out the links down below. A special VPN deal, as always. Great discount there. Also, protect some of your data. Other links as well, channel memberships, Locals, and Patreon, etc. But I'll cut it there and stop rambling. As always, thank you all for watching. Question everything and have a nice night.