I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven Am. TikTok is the most influential media platform for Australians under the age of twenty five. It's where millions get their news, whether they realize it or not. But TikTok is no longer just a cultural force. A trumpelined group of investors has taken over its American operations, aimed at keeping China
at arm's length. Now users a claiming that content about ICE and its operations in Minnesota, where two American civilians were killed by federal agents, has been difficult to post, disappearing from the algorithm or reaching far fewer people than expected. TikTok has denied political censorship, saying the platform was experiencing technical disruption at the time. But it's raised the question when it comes to TikTok, who gets to decide what
Americans see and what gets buried. Today, we're bringing you an episode from last year with associate editor at Kraki Cam Wilson, on the trumpification of TikTok. It's Sunday, February eight. This episode was originally published in October of twenty twenty five. Cam, is there a particular type of news or topic that travels best on TikTok or does that really depend on the user's own personal feed.
Users have very very personalized feeds, and so every person's feed is very different. But the stuff that tends to break through are those kind of monoculture events, and those kinds of events are increasingly rare, but you know, things like the Charlie Kirk assassination. But it's also subject to the dynamics that affects many other things on social media on the Internet, which is, if something is video, it's going to go better on TikTok because you need the
footage actually see something. And also things that encourage reactions, people responding conflict. Those are the kinds of things that are more likely to bubble through. You know what's about them, maybe nitty gritty of policy details and more about the fights, the thing that is dividing people. That is the stuff that naturally bubbles to the top, purely because of the way that these platforms like TikTok work, And.
What about the design of TikTok itself, how has that influenced and changed the way other social media platforms work.
Yeah, I mean TikTok's will lad this trend that's taken over social media. I think it's pretty fair to say we are in a post social media world. The idea of Facebook connecting you to your friend, your family, your local community, the people who you know is kind of over, I think. Like in fact, so TikTok kind of led this new era of what it means to have social content, and it said, we don't really care that much about
who you say you were for. We're going to use these other signals to determine what to show you because we actually think it's more engaging. We know you say that you want, but when we give you the stuff that you really want that we think will interest you.
And so now there's a battle layer of the future of TikTok as a company, and it's framed as a battle between Washington and China over TikTok being a national security threat. So sit us down and tell us where this battle begins.
Yeah, I mean it really throughout its whole history, as soon as it became clearly an ascendent major platform, it has faced scrutiny and criticism because of its link to the Chinese Communist Party, and particularly in the US with I think one hundred and seventy million users now in the US, so an astronomical amount. It faced scrutiny on
two areas. The first one is this idea of data that it's collecting from accusers, so you know, whenever you look on your locasion other information about your device, that is going to TikTok, that's going to buy dance, and the kind of accusation has always been that it's going
to the Chinese Communist Party. Scond thing is this idea of it as a propaganda too, And if you consider it, like you know, the eight million austrains one hundred and seventy million US users, this app has a director line into all their lives and it is able to show them content that is actually failure paid to anyone else, like all that feels in distinct to be different. It's very hard to know from the outside. It's not like television with you to tuting and see whatever and else
is watching, or check the TV guide or whatever. And there's always been this idea that the rules that the platform makes could be used full of various purposes. And so this idea that it represents a threat to national security because there could be people leaning on people and buydowance to encourage certain content to be shown to users, like, for example, content critical of their governments, or that it could be used to censor content that was critical of the Chinese government.
You know.
Viewing it not just as a kind of data extraction operation potentially, but also something that could be used to push certain messages with very little scrutiny has made all of people uneasy about it.
And so what has the US government done about that?
The history of TikTok and US Congress goes back to twenty twenty when there was a review into TikTok by the American government about the idea of it being a potential national security threat, saying that either TikTok has to divest and pass over its ownership to American owners or
will ban it. And the result of that was that TikTok signed this very bizarre deal with Oracle, which is own and run by Larry Ellison, the Trump BELLI yeah exactly, and Oracle would host American TikTok user data in America and also have some kind of oversight role into its algorithm, its secret source. It didn't really address the underlying concerns.
You know, data that's physically album in America can still be accessed in China, as it turns out was the case when by Dance reportedly access the data of a American journalist.
Byte Dance, TikTok's parent has acknowledged four employees inappropriately obtained data of some US TikTok users, including two journalists. In a statement, the company condemned the actions of those involved and said they're no longer employed, but that's no reassurance the mind.
And then this ambient concern over TikTok continued through the Biden presidency until it was credited that the October seventh attack revitalized interest in TikTok. From Congress was the accusation that the content that was being shown to TikTok users was leading to a rise in pro Palestinian sympathy in young Americans.
Every thirty minutes that someone watches TikTok every day, they become seventeen percent more anti Semitic, more pro hamask Based on to that, we now know that fifty percent of adult eighteen to twenty five, I think that Hamas was warranted, and what they did with Israel that's a problem.
Whether that's true, I think is far from proven. I don't think that we've ever seen really conclusive evidence that. For example, you know that there was a company directive to promote certain points of views about the Israel Gaza conflict. But regardless, this fervor led to the bipartisan support for the bill. The bill pass that TikTok needed to be under American ownership or face a ban by January nineteen,
twenty twenty five. Coincidentally, the day before Donald Trump was sworn in, and when Trump came in, he delayed the ban a number of times until recently the final deal that was carried out by the Trump administration.
After the break Trump talk so cam last year, the US Congress passed a law that said foreign adverse recontrolled apps like TikTok need to divest or be banned. And now Donald Trump assigned an executive order that would pave the way for an American run version of TikTok.
Next, sir, we have an executive order on TikTok. From the first days of your administration. You've charged a team from your administration, led by Vice President Vance, with ensuring that we can preserve TikTok as a platform for one hundred and seventy million Americans who use it while ensuring that their data is properly protected as required by law with this executive or.
So, can you just explain what this executive order sets out?
Yeah, so we are now close to the year of trup talk where there is an American owned entity that will license a version of TikTok's algorithm, you.
Know, run by American investors and American companies, great ones.
Great investors are the biggest. You don't get bigger, I don't imagine.
And maybe and there has also been discussions about retraining or you know, essentially fiddling around it and having its own twist on that algorithm. So that recipe that's deciding what to show uses. But from what we know about it, by dance, the company that has owned TikTok until recently will now be a minor owner in a US entity
that will control the US operations. The major owners are Oracle that I mentioned before, which is run by a very close Trump ally who's been involved before, but now his role has grown in it.
You'll see a list have you seen a list yet of the people, Well, you've been reading about that, it's I know, Michael Dell's involved, and Rupert Murdocks involved, and a lot of and let's say we have probably four or five absolutely worldless and that's just that love the country and they made a lot of money with the country.
And so these are a group of all Trump aligned figures who are, you know, very rich people who involve in a whole bunch of other things, who now have some kind of control over TikTok. We just really don't exactly understand how it works, but it's fair to say that they will have some kind of influence over how TikTok works in America for American users.
So we're saying a shift from a Chinese government aligned ownership to a Trump aligned ownership. What do you think that will mean for the type of news that we see on TikTok from now on.
I think that we should expect it to change in some way, and I don't know how. When Trump was signing the executive order, he joked about it being onega content, was his line.
I always liked MAGA related.
If I could make it one hundred percent MAGA related, it's actually a good question, but I would, Yeah, if I could make it one hundred percent, I would, but it's not going to work out that way.
Unfortunately.
Now everyone's going to be treated fairly every group.
We have seen that Trump has shepherded various traditional media properties to his allies, including Larry Elson's son, who recently bought Skydance, which is a big media company that has recently merged with Paramount and owns a lot of popular
American media properties, including NBC News. They're also apparently looking to buy Warner Brothers, so there was an enormous amount of cultural reach and popular properties that it currently owns and potentially could own, And David Elson has expressed that he would like to rejig NBC News to represent a more conservative point of view. He's a very strong pro Israel advocate, and it's believed that he'd like to see that opinion reflected in the properties that he owns as well.
So it wouldn't be crazy to imagine that that same thing would happen with TikTok. We're seeing, you know, all of these very very powerful companies that have a lot of cultural influence being shepherded into the hands of people who are closely aligned with Trump. So it is I think a pretty significant change in an environment that was
already pretty homogeneous in terms of its ownership. The few holdouts, it seems like, are now being shepherded away and the keys of the kingdom are being handed over to the friends with the king.
And cam It seems like maybe the next generation would escape the influence of the Murdoch Empire. In the past, they've been notoriously bad at speaking to younger audiences, remember the MySpace moment, of course, yes, But in getting a stake in TikTok, is there a sign their influence over the next generation will actually increase?
I don't know, so I think you know. One of the great strengths of news corp in particularly Australia in the US as well is the way that it is able to use its influence for its own corporate interests. So wouldn't surprise you that if they got their hands on some kind of control over a social media platform that so far they've not really had any control over, that they use it to promote themselves, promote their other properties, promote their ideological views. It wouldn't surprise me at all.
That being said, the reason they're cautious is that one as far as I know, they're not a major owner. The second thing is that there are a whole bunch of owners, and I think that you know, while people like political influence, they also have brought in because it's a money making operation as well. Anything that could threaten the popularity of it, would, you know, not just affect
the Murdocks, but also other people as well. I understand why people are alarmed, but I think that there is a balance of these owners of this new Trump talk what aboutance Like, of course they want to if further they're ideological mission. We've seen that, I think with many of their owners, but they're also business people who've brought into something that could make them a lot of money.
And like you know, at the end of the day, it's sometimes it's hard with all the business leaders who are expressing fuelty to the Trump administration, tata exactly know whether that is from the heart or from the bottom line. I think it's worth paying attention considering how those goals might influence each other.
Follow the money, follow the money, follow the feed and the money. Thanks so much for your time, Cam, Thank you, thanks for listening to seven AM. We'll be back tomorrow with a new episode first Thing in the morning on the billionaires, big companies and secret dark money donors who are influencing our pulleys and our elections. Plus a billionaire Clive Palmer could be both part of the problem and the solution to our political donation problem.
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