Umer Bin AjmalOn many nights over the past two years, teenagers across the United States opened TikTok not for watching dance videos or memes, but to witness first-hand what was going on in Gaza.
The app helped beam shaky footage of Israeli brutality against the Palestinians to tens of millions of young people — most of them Gen Z — who otherwise were largely oblivious or confused about the Middle East’s longest-running dispute.
Ambulances pulling children from rubble, mothers wailing outside hospitals, skeletal children dying of starvation, and journalists being killed — TikTok had helped capture all of this in its raw, unedited form, something that legacy Western media was censoring or, at best, showing a very toned-down version of what was happening on the ground.
For a generation that does not watch the famed nightly news on cable TV, TikTok became both a newsroom and a witness stand.
But all of this is in danger. There’s concern that Americans won’t be able to witness the plight of Palestinians after TikTok’s US operation is taken over by a consortium of US firms.
Earlier this week, US President Donald Trump announced that Washington and Beijing struck a deal to move TikTok’s American operations into a new US-led company.
Software giant Oracle Corporation, along with private equity firm Silver Lake and venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, will hold roughly 80 percent of the new entity. The rest will remain with ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent. Oracle will host US user data on its Texas servers, while an American-dominated board, including at least one government-appointed director, will oversee governance.
To some, the arrangement looks like a security fix, as officials in Washington have time and again said TikTok’s ownership by ByteDance makes it beholden to the Chinese government, and Beijing could use the app to conduct influence operations against the US and collect data on Americans.
But to others who see TikTok as a one large newsroom filled with citizen journalists, this means the app is falling under the control of firms with deep financial, institutional and even ideological ties to Israel.
What has happened in these companies in the recent past about Israel’s war in Gaza underpins those concerns.
Reporting by The Intercept and human-rights monitors have documented internal campaigns in which Oracle employees were encouraged to back pro-Israel messaging projects. Some workers who expressed solidarity with Palestinians faced internal discipline or left the company.
Investigations have cited Slack threads where teams discussed “elevating” pro-Israel content. Even Oracle’s philanthropy reflects alignment: donations to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency service, and expanded data centres in Israel signal not just business interests but political posture.
Then there is the matter of personnel.
In July, TikTok quietly hired Erica Mindel, a former Israeli soldier who has spoken publicly about how Tel Aviv’s 2014 war on Gaza shaped her “Zionist identity”, to lead its hate-speech policy team.
Her appointment, praised by pro-Israel lobbying groups, alarmed free-speech advocates who fear moderation standards will now blur the line between tackling anti-Semitism and suppressing Palestinian voices.
Andreessen Horowitz, meanwhile, has also been steadily expanding its portfolio in Israel.
The Silicon Valley powerhouse now invests across Israeli cybersecurity, cloud and AI startups, hosting events that connect local founders with global capital. Observers say these moves deepen not only financial but strategic ties to Israel’s tech and security ecosystem.
So, what does that mean for TikTok users scrolling through their feeds?
The fear is subtle but profound: that moderation choices, like what counts as graphic content, what qualifies as support for terrorism or what simply disappears, could tilt towards an Israeli state narrative.
It would not be the first time if this happens.
Creators and journalists who posted footage from Gaza during the war described videos that went viral, then vanished from recommendation feeds. Hashtags tied to Palestinian narratives occasionally went dark. Clips mocking Israeli policies had their audio stripped, only to be restored later after public uproar.
Researchers tracking moderation found that Arabic-language posts, especially from the MENA region, were prone to takedowns, a sign that automated systems and ill-equipped reviewers often defaulted to removal.
For activists and digital-rights groups, the core issue is who controls the gates.
Oracle already holds TikTok’s US datasets under a programme known as Project Texas. If it now controls both the servers and the governance board, it gains power not only over security but over what survives moderation.
And paired with Andreessen Horowitz’s growing footprint in Israel, the ownership picture looks even less neutral.
Supporters of the deal, however, push back, insisting the move is about national security, not geopolitics. They say Oracle’s role is custodial, not editorial, and that algorithmic independence could remain intact.
But the technical and legal details, such as who controls the recommendation engine, who sets moderation policy and who oversees appeals, remain opaque.
Two recent changes already restrict public oversight: TikTok removed hashtag view counts in early 2024, depriving researchers of a key tool to measure reach, and now the US users will soon migrate to a separate American app.
Both shifts could allow changes in policy and distribution to happen behind closed doors. That risks limiting the content that users, especially young people, interact with.
“The Palestinians need help. We need to elevate their voices, their stories. We need to stand up for them,” a TikTok creator who goes by yourfavoriteguy, with over 3.4 million followers, posted in the early weeks of Israel’s offensive on Gaza.
In his most recent pinned post, already at 1.8 million views and climbing, yourfavoriteguy debunked a viral claim that “there is food in Gaza, any other claim is a lie”.
He highlighted an investigation that revealed Google had signed a $45 million contract with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to “push propaganda that Israel is not starving the Palestinians to death in Gaza”.
That kind of intervention reflects a broader trend.
A University of Leeds master’s thesis, which analysed TikTok responses to the war through multimodal discourse analysis, confirmed what many young users themselves describe: the app is pulling casual viewers into political engagement and reshaping how they understand the conflict.
For the young Americans who first learned of Israel’s war on their phones, it makes sense to wonder if they’d be able to see the aftermath the next time Israel drops a bomb on Gaza, or if it will vanish before it’s shared and goes viral.
