Trump’s New TikTok Deal Heightens Concerns Over Broader Media Censorship

TikTok app icon on a mobile phone. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Solen Feyissa.

On January 22, users of the popular social media app TikTok opened the app to find that the terms and conditions had changed. Many clicked past the pesky notification and continued scrolling; however, had they taken the time to read it, they would’ve learned the app’s data collection process was changing.  The app’s Chinese owner had sold TikTok to a group of non-Chinese investors, creating a new U.S. TikTok and marking major changes ahead for users.

The debate over TikTok’s ties to China began about six years ago, when Donald Trump first called for the app to be banned in the U.S. due to security concerns. In August 2020, he issued an executive order threatening sanctions against the app’s parent company, ByteDance, if it did not divest its U.S. interests. According to the order, TikTok “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.” The order was struck down by the Biden administration in 2021, but when Trump returned to office four years later, having TikTok sold to a U.S. company remained high on his priority list. 

In 2024, Trump used his support of TikTok as a major talking point in his presidential campaign. “We’re not doing anything with TikTok, but the other side’s going to close it up. So if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump,” he said in a Truth Social post. 

He continued to voice his support for the app despite disapproval in Washington, as the U.S. The Supreme Court ruled in January 2025 that the app’s connection to China was a matter of official national security concern. SCOTUS gave investors two days to devise a solution that would limit ByteDance’s involvement, or the app would be banned. Once inaugurated, Trump signed an early executive order extending the ban deadline by 75 days, and later by another 3 months.

In September 2025, Trump signed another executive order outlining his plan to sell TikTok to American investors for $14 million. Oracle, Silver Lake, and the MGX Fund were among these investors, with Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison “playing a very big part,” according to Trump.  These three main investors are estimated to hold a combined 45% stake in the app, while stakeholders own 35%, leaving ByteDance with less than 20% of the company.

Under the new deal, over 80% of TikTok is owned by U.S. investors, but whether it will comply with the Supreme Court’s guidelines remains to be determined. TikTok’s success is rooted in its unique algorithm, which leverages features like user shares and view length to create a feed tailored to each user. The app’s new owners said the system “will retrain, test, and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data,” implying the current algorithm will remain. 

This raises the question of whether the new algorithm complies with the Court’s ruling, which stated there should be no “cooperation” between ByteDance and the new U.S. version. The new version licenses the algorithm from ByteDance under the terms of the deal, which would still give the Chinese company control over what U.S. users see. Chris Krebs, former director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the license means  “ByteDance still retains leverage over what the U.S. platform shows its 170 million users.”

Nonetheless, it is unclear what TikTok’s new algorithm will look like for users, as some worry the new ownership could result in content that excessively and unfairly promotes narratives aligned with the U.S. government. These worries stem from the new app’s leadership having direct ties to Trump, including Oracle’s Larry Ellison. MGX has also worked directly with the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial, as the firm’s stablecoin was used to fund MGX’s investment in Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange.

Anupam Chander, a law and technology professor at Georgetown University, said he believes the companies’ involvement could lead the algorithm to push conservative-biased media and constitute government overreach. 

“My worry all along is that we may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda,” Chander said. 

Concerns over TikTok’s new ownership reflect a larger sentiment that the Trump administration is censoring the media. In July 2025, the Republican-controlled Congress voted to cut over $1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which defunded many national stations like NPR and PBS. These cuts forced many smaller, more rural stations to shut down. In January 2026, the CPB voted to dissolve the whole organization.

NPR CEO Katherine Maher said the act was “an unwarranted dismantling of beloved local civic institutions, and an act of Congress that disregards the public will.” The NPR statement also said the “nation suffered a tremendous setback” under Trump due to the administration’s cuts to public media.

Across the political aisle, conservatives celebrated cuts to public news media. David Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, an organization that has supported federal cuts for decades, said PBS and NPR only show media that is biased towards the political left and silences conservative ideas.

Many cite Elon Musk’s purchase of X, formerly Twitter, as even further evidence that government interference can change the content of a social media app. Since Musk has taken over the app, he’s introduced various measures — including adjusting algorithms to boost conservative content and reinstating banned accounts — to become more favorable toward right-leaning political ideologies.

Jacob Ward, a science and technology reporter at The Rip Current, said he does not believe the effects of TikTok’s ownership switch have taken hold yet, but warns users that a shift in the app’s political message and censorship is highly possible.

“If in the future they decided to do what Musk decided to do [with X], they would have every kind of controls available to them to pull that off, because that is exactly how TikTok is built,” Ward said.