Trump's Shady TikTok Deal Will Have Oracle "Retrain" Your Algorithm [View all]

Conservative billionaires with a clear agenda are about to control your TikTok algorithm.

https://newrepublic.com/post/200736/trump-tiktok-deal-oracle-retrain-algorithm

https://archive.ph/x76Vh



President Trump plans to “save” TikTok by handing it over to America’s oligarchs. A senior White House official confirmed Monday that ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, plans to move an 80 percent stake of its company to America’s richest, most powerful men. ByteDance will create a separate, American copy of its infamous algorithm to lease to a new group spearheaded by Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz, Larry Ellison’s Oracle, and the private equity firm Silver Lake. Ellison and Oracle will then control U.S. user data and be able to shape the algorithm as they see fit.

“The algorithm will be retrained from the ground up and protected by Oracle to ensure Americans’ data is safeguarded and foreign influence is removed,” a senior official told Fox News. Trump, who has floated banning and saving TikTok multiple times now, has given the men 120 days to finalize a deal. On Sunday, the president also confirmed that Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell and conservative media moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch will also likely be involved in the deal.

The involvement of conservative billionaires and technocrats in the deal has raised valid concerns over the future of free speech. Conservatives are on the record blaming TikTok, for example, for the fact that the overwhelming majority of young Americans are opposed to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. While writing for Bari Weiss’s Zionist The Free Press, former Republican Representative and current Palantir “head of defense” Mike Gallagher outright blamed TikTok’s algorithm for making young people “support Hamas.” Gallagher isn’t alone. In fact, his position is identical to the rest of the GOP.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts,” Senator Mitt Romney said during a panel in May of last year. “So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the president will get the chance to make action in that regard.” Now, that algorithm—and your data— will be retrained and refiltered by Oracle and Ellison, who has a very close relationship with the Israeli Defense Forces and believes that “there is no greater honor” than supporting Israel.

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