Via: AP

By Atika Ume Fazal

For many of us, on the 26th and 27th of January, our peaceful doomscrolling time was interrupted by videos glitching and refusing to play out in their entirety. The sound would cut off, the video would get pixelated, and the content would come to a halt. Oftentimes, the clips being affected were from explicitly anti-Trump and anti-ICE accounts, leading people to believe the new owners of the US patent of Tiktok had a part to play in it.

In fact, a new board of seven investors will be governing the TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, a separate entity tasked with controlling the data and algorithms of American users. The original Chinese owner, ByteDance, now only holds 19.9% of the US-patent of the app while the remaining 80.1% is shared between majoritarily American companies.

This venture had to happen in order to satisfy the US Supreme Court hearing back in early 2025 that deemed TikTok illegal per the data standards of the country. The January 2025 hearing, the cause of the day-long US ban of the app, gave ByteDance an ultimatum; either they lose their 200 million American users or they sell their ownership stake. 

The opportunity cost of choosing the first was too monumental. Out of the 80.1% patent sold to American companies, 45% is shared equally between three major corporations: Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. Representatives from these enterprises also hold a place on the board of directors regarding this business venture. Along with them is seated TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. Additionally, Adam Presser, a Harvard graduate that held the role of Head of Operations, was named president of this board.

“The lack of non-partisanship from these entities was immediately concerning.”

As a matter of fact, Presser takes pride in having moderated the use of “Zionist” in a negative context as immediate hate speech and anti-semitism, as he told his seminar attendees in Al-Quds (Jerusalem) in 2024.

Additionally,  Larry Ellison, Oracle founder, owner, and tech billionaire, is known for his numerous controversies over the years. When Ellison is not creating graphs out of stolen data, like he did in 2017, or trying to suggest a national ID database in 2001 that raises serious security concerns, he tends to socialize with his close friends Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. 

He also demonstrated his support for Israel and its occupation by donating 16.6 million dollars to the Friends of the Israel Defence Forces organization in 2017. At the time the donation was made, it was the largest one that organism had ever received.

MGX also has incredibly controversial involvements in their short history. Created in 2024, MGX is an Abu Dhabi-backed and founded investment firm that focuses on the development and distribution of AI based technologies. Now the horrible consequences of AI are no secret–whether it be the environmental, intellectual, or social ones. 

Furthermore, given the United Arab Emirates’ significant involvement in the war ravaging Sudan, the company stays far from irreproachable. The UAE is known to provide militias with arms and ammunition in exchange for resources – primarily gold – and those militias create inhumane environments for the citizens of Sudan. This suggests that some of the funding that went towards the creation of MGX was blood money collected by the sovereigns. 

Additionally, MGX also possesses its own questionable relationship with Trump and his family. In fact, there have been accusations of the company illegally investing 2 billion dollars into the US president’s crypto company for potential future deals in early 2025.

The eligibility of a foreign based and handled company holding such a big part of this new venture is also extremely doubtful. If so much of the fear behind the original banning of the app resided in the fact that foreign companies had access to American data, the decision to sell 15% to another seems peculiar.

Even the glitches possibly being a form of censorship put the entire concept of “securing Americans’s data” into question.

The people having power over the app seem to all, in one way or another, be involved in Trump’s different jurisdictions, and the glitches seemingly only affect videos that are about the I.C.E. raids and/or anti-Trump. 

This excessive amount of power in the hands of a single man, especially when the United States continues to violate human rights and international law, raises many concerns.