The messy truth about TikTok’s Trump-aligned takeover

It's been just over a week since TikTok – in the United States – passed into the hands of new owners. And it's been chaos ever since.

At the government's urging, TikTok's parent company ByteDance sold the app to a largely American group of investors, including software giant Oracle (founded by Trump ally Larry Ellison), MGX (an Abu Dhabi-based company also involved in Trump's crypto ventures), and private equity firm Silver Lake.

But since the new owners took control, there have been significant outages and malfunctions, accusations of censorship and uproar over updated terms of service.

Explained today Guest host Jonquilyn Hill sat down with David Pierce, Editor in Chief at The Verge, to discuss people's concerns about TikTok's new owners and what this could mean for people's experiences with the social media app in the future. Below is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast. So listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, PandoraAnd Spotify.

American TikTok now has new owners and almost immediately after the acquisition, people started reporting problems with the app. I want to start with the big one. People said they were being censored. What is going on and what complaints are there?

That's the big thing. It is also the most complicated topic because it is fundamentally about feelings. So you have to understand that everyone has always believed that they will be censored on social media. This has always been the story of social media. What's happening on TikTok right now, in my opinion, is less about censorship and more about normal internet problems.

There were many people who reported that they were uploading videos about what was happening in Minneapolis, but that those videos were not getting any views, or that those videos were actually not being uploaded properly. There were people who said that if you DM someone else with the word “Epstein,” it wouldn’t get through. All of this can be more easily and equally successfully explained by normal corporate incompetence.

TikTok's new data center provider, Oracle, experienced a major outage. We believe we know it was a large data center in Virginia that had what we called a weather-related issue. They had major problems in the data center and that seems to be the real culprit here.

There are many good reasons to be concerned about censorship. There are a lot of potential censorship issues looming on TikTok, but rationally speaking, the likelihood that this new group would have taken over TikTok and immediately pushed a big red “censorship” button is pretty unlikely.

Is there any way for us to actually know? I mean, people are pretty skeptical about TikTok right now.

I think a useful analogue here is Elon Musk's purchase and acquisition of Twitter. And when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he just said out loud all the changes he wanted to make, right? This was after years of conservatives in particular declaring that they would be censored by Twitter's existing leadership.

So Elon Musk comes in and essentially says, “I’m going to turn this around.” And then a lot of very obvious things happen. So I think there's a version of this that feels very obvious. It's just that at the moment there are better, simpler Occam's razor-sharp explanations for what's going on.

What about the new terms of service that people had to agree to?

This is a tricky one, because the funny thing about the terms of service for apps like this is that they're always scary, and often for reasons that aren't scary at all.

What happened in this case is that there are some new things in the terms of service. The new TikTok US will collect more precise location data if you allow it. It also gives TikTok permission to collect a lot of data around nebulous AI things, making it clear that they're going to be doing a lot of genetic AI things within TikTok, and that's data they can collect.

But this has actually been in TikTok's terms of service for some time. However, I think it is legitimate to be concerned that this data is being collected by a new group of people.

All of this is the business side; But will my experience with the app change now?

The one thing that no other platform could actually replicate well [is TikTok’s algorithm]. But now one of the provisions of this agreement is that there must be a meaningful separation of this algorithm from Chinese control. The new owners will “retrain, test and update” the algorithm. This is very vague wording, but it means that the algorithm will change in some way. But we won't see that [how] for a while.