From CBS to TikTok, Pro-Israel Ellisons now in the driver's seat

There were two campaigns driving the ultimate sale of TikTok today. One featured claims that the Chinese government was using the wildly popular social media app as a back door to Americans' personal data and was a national security threat. The second: that it was propagating anti-Israel messaging in regards to the Gaza war among millions of young people, especially Americans.

As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously said of her reportedly wrongheaded Columbia University students just a few months ago, "They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok...That is where they were learning about what happened on October 7th, what happened in the, you know, days, weeks, and months to follow. That’s a serious problem."

Well that might not be a problem anymore. There are new owners of TikTok in town, and a majority chunk are the kind that if they have their druthers, won't let that kind of "information" — what did Sarah Hurwitz say, the "wall of dead children"? — continue to flow in the same way.

Last night the Chinese owner of ByteDance said it had struck a deal with a consortium of investors in which ByteDance will now have less than a 20% stake in the app going forward. The deal was a mandate: Congress had passed a law last year that said TikTok could no longer be majority owned by a company linked to the Chinese government. So 80% will be owned by investors including software giant Oracle (co-founder is Larry Ellison); MGX, an Emirati investment firm; and Silver Lake, another investment firm. They will each have a 15% stake.

Ellison, as I wrote here, is the single biggest private investor in the Friends of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), and a major Republican donor. He has referred to the state of Israel as his own. He and his son David Ellison own and control a head spinning galaxy of news, television, and Hollywood media companies, mainly through the recent Paramount Skydance Corporation takeover. Ellison the younger just gave Free Press founder Bari Weiss, a pro-Zionist activist, control of newly-acquired CBS. Ellison the elder also is a major stakeholder in X and Tesla.

It is not clear yet that other pro-Israel figures, including Oracle Vice Executive Chair and former CEO Safra Catz (who traveled to Israel on behalf of the company several times in the last two years to ensure it fidelity to Israel's cause), Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch (who once said Israel is "alone on the front line of Western democratic civilization") or Republican mega-donor Jeff Yass who has funding ties to IDF and AIPAC, are included in the roster of investors, as reported earlier.

It is also not clear how and when the content users will see will changes, as the algorithm is reportedly staying in ByteDance's control with leasing rights to the new investors. Analysts also question whether "national security" concerns will be placated with the sale as well.

But for all of us watching how Israel has been behaving over the last year: paying influencers enormous sums, messing with Chat GPT, training Evangelical pastors to be their "ambassadors" in the U.S., this is yet another, albeit, powerful tool to control what we hear and see of their policies in Gaza and in the West Bank. This isn't paranoia. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it himself, that social media is “the most important weapon … to secure our base in the U.S." and TikTok was “the most important purchase going on right now,” with its control "consequential."

No doubt the Ellisons and Hillary Clinton feel the same way today.