It’s been just over a week since TikTok, in the United States, passed into the hands of new owners. And since then it’s been a disaster.
At the government’s insistence, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sold the app to a group of mostly American investors, including corporate 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, the app has suffered major outages and malfunctions, complaints of censorship, and uproar over its updated terms of service.
Today, explained Guest host Jonquilyn Hill sat down with David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge, to discuss people’s concerns about TikTok’s new owners and what this may mean for people’s experiences on the social media app in the future. Below is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s so much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you find podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
American TikTok now has new owners and almost immediately after they took over, people started reporting problems with the app. I want to start with the big one. People said they were being censored. What is happening there and what are the complaints?
That’s the big one. It is also the most complicated to solve because, fundamentally, it is about feelings. So one thing to understand is that everyone has always believed that they are being censored on social media. Since time immemorial, this is the history of social networks. What’s happening on TikTok is that at this particular moment I believe less in censorship and more in normal internet problems.
There were many people who reported that they were uploading videos about what was happening in Minneapolis and that those videos were not getting any views or were not actually loading correctly. There were people who said that if you texted the word “Epstein” to someone else, it wouldn’t work. All of this is more easily and just as successfully explained by normal corporate ineptitude.
TikTok’s new data center provider, Oracle, suffered a major outage. What we think we know is that it was a large data center in Virginia that had what they called a weather-related issue. They’ve had big problems in the data center and that seems to be the real culprit here.
There are many good reasons to worry about censorship. There are plenty of potential censorship issues on TikTok, but rationally speaking, the likelihood that this new group would have taken over TikTok and immediately hit a big red “censorship” button is pretty unlikely.
Is there a way for us to really know? I mean, people are pretty skeptical of TikTok right now.
I think a useful analogy here is when Elon Musk bought and took over Twitter. And when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he just said out loud all the changes he intended to make, right? And this was after years of conservatives, in particular, saying they were being censored by Twitter’s existing leaders.
So Elon Musk comes in and basically says, I’m going to reverse that. And then he does a lot of very obvious things. So I think there’s a version of this that seems very obvious. It’s just that for now, there are better, simpler, Occam’s Razor-type explanations for what’s going on.
What about the new terms of service that people had to accept?
This is a complicated question because one of the funniest things about terms of service on apps like these is that they are always scary, and often are scary 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 on nebulous AI things that make it clear that they’re going to do a lot of types of AI things generated within TikTok, and that’s data that they can collect.
But actually, that’s already been in TikTok’s terms of service for some time. Still, I think it’s reasonable to be alarmed that this data is going to be collected by a new group of people.
This is all the business side; But will my experience with the application change now?
The only thing that no other platform has actually replicated well [is TikTok’s algorithm]. But now, one of the stipulations of this agreement is that there has to be some meaningful separation of that algorithm from Chinese control. The new owners are going to “retrain, test and update” the algorithm. That’s a very vague phrase, but it means that somehow the algorithm is going to change. But we are not going to see that. [how] for a while.