OVER the past days, social media users, activists and influencers have flocked to a new social media platform, founded by a Palestinian-Australian engineer, after TikTok announced that it closed a $14 billion deal establishing a US subsidiary of the platform, giving pro-Israel billionaires the power to impose anti-Palestinian agenda and control the algorithms.
According to new users of UpScrolled, they “fight the Zionist control” where “every voice gets equal power. No shadowbans. No algorithmic games. No pay-to-play favoritism.”
What’s the Deal and Who Owns It Now
The short-video platform, which is used by more than 200 million Americans and 7.5 million businesses, announced on Thursday that it had closed a deal that will establish a joint venture for parts of its US business with a group of investors.
Three managing investors will each hold a 15% stake in the new venture: Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and state-owned investment firm in Abu Dhabi MGX.
ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, will maintain a 19.9% minority stake. It will continue to oversee key commercial areas like e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.
The new TikTok US joint venture said it’s appointing a seven-person board of directors, which will include TikTok CEO Shou Chew, as well as representatives from investors like Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX.
Meanwhile, Adam Presser, a TikTok trust and safety executive, will act as CEO of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.
Larry Ellison is the chairman and cofounder of Oracle. Oracle already oversees TikTok US user data under a previous arrangement set up over security concerns called Project Texas. The company will now secure more of the app, including by retraining and updating its recommendation algorithm based on US user data.
TikTok says both the algorithm and US user data will be protected in “Oracle’s secure US cloud environment.”
David Scott, MGX’s chief strategy and safety officer, will serve on the joint venture’s board of directors and security committee.
Silver Lake’s Egon Durban and Greg Mondre both act as co-CEOs and managing partners at the private equity firm. Durban will join the TikTok US joint venture’s board of directors.
Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell is also involved in the deal. Dell’s family office is one of several new investors TikTok listed as being part of a consortium.
Under the agreement, the new entity will separately secure and store US user data in line with US cybersecurity laws. “The majority American owned Joint Venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for US users,” TikTok’s statement read.
The entity will safeguard US content “through robust trust and safety policies and content moderation while ensuring continuous accountability through transparency reporting and third-party certifications,” it added.
TikTok added that the US division’s algorithm will be “retrained” on US user data. The company also said US creators will remain discoverable on a global scale.
What Happened?
TikTok’s struggles in the US began in 2020, during Trump’s first term as president, when the US tried to force the app to divest from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, after it was deemed a national security risk.
Although Trump signed an executive order instructing ByteDance to hand control to US companies before his first term ended, the Biden administration reversed it and passed a legislation to force the platform to divest itself of its ownership.
Trump delayed the ban via an executive order when he assumed office in January 2025.
The US had concerns about how ByteDance would handle data about US users, and whether China could pressure it to hand that data over.
There were also concerns that Beijing could influence the app’s powerful algorithm. ByteDance and China have consistently denied that Beijing pressures companies to collect and hand over user data. But China has also insisted that TikTok and its algorithm must remain under Chinese control.
In April 2024, Congress passed a law that would ban TikTok in the US if ByteDance failed to sell its US operations to US owners by January 19, 2025. The law specified that TikTok US should cut ties with ByteDance. TikTok sued the US government, but the US Supreme Court upheld the ban.
The platform voluntarily went offline for about 12 hours on January 18, the day before the ban was due to come into effect. Its service was restored after then President-elect Trump confirmed that he would extend the deadline once he took office.
The president extended the deadline for 75 days via an executive order on January 20, the same day he was sworn in. He then signed executive orders periodically to continue putting off the ban.
In September, Trump said he had reached a deal with China that would allow TikTok to keep operating in the US. According to a December memo from TikTok’s Singaporean CEO Shou Zi Chew, US firms and other investors had signed agreements regarding a divestment plan.
In a post on Truth Social early on Friday, Trump touted “saving TikTok” and said the agreement marked a “very dramatic, final and beautiful conclusion”.
“It will now be owned by a group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World, and will be an important Voice,” Trump wrote.
“I only hope that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok,” the president added.
Trump has repeatedly praised the app for enabling him to reach a younger fan base during the campaign season.
What Is Behind the Ban
Critics and human rights advocates say the problem was Palestine and Israel.
“This was never about China in that way. Never. It’s about who gets to control American’s minds, especially young American’s minds,” Guy Christensen, an American online influencer and founding creator at UpScrolled, told Quds News Network (QNN). “It was about Israel.”
Christensen added, “Our data was far better off in the hands of China because at the very least it wouldn’t be weaponized by our tech-oligarchs to feed mass surveillance algorithms that are used against the American people.”
He said those who own the “public squares control the public discourse.”
“That’s why we’ve seen far-right billionaires rush to collect media companies under their belts these last few years.”
TikTok played an important role in the sea change of US opinion about Israel, particularly among young people. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, condemned the sale as a “desperate” attempt to silence young Americans.
While many mainstream media outlets pushed coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, TikTok users watched unfiltered videos of Israel’s massacres and attacks on Palestinian civilians over more than two years.
A March Pew Research poll found Israel’s unfavorable rating among Republicans aged 18 to 49 had risen from 35 to 50 percent (among the same age group of Democrats, the country’s unfavorability also climbed almost 10 percentage points to 71 percent). A September New York Times/Siena University survey found 54 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 13 percent expressed greater empathy for Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that he understands the consequences of access to unfiltered social media.
He recently described the sale of TikTok as “the most important purchase happening. … I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.”
Netanyahu, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, sees control of TikTok as a part of Israel’s military strategy.
“You have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield, and one of the most important ones is social media,” he continued.
In 2024, then-Sen. Mitt Romney said the support for a nationwide ban on TikTok is connected to the “overwhelming” volume of “mentions of Palestinians” on the popular platform.
At a McCain Institute forum, Romney asked Antony Blinken why Israel and the US have “been so ineffective at communicating” justifications for the genocide in Gaza.
“You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion — the impact of images — dominates,” Blinken said.
Romney replied, “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.”
Even before the 2024 law was passed, TikTok had begun taking steps to silence users who have criticized Israel and supported Palestine. In July 2025, TikTok hired Erica Mindel, a former Israeli soldier with a documented record of anti-Palestinian politics and self-described “proud Zionist”, to police user speech on the platform. Days after, TikTok updated its guidelines to include a ban on referring to Israeli forces as “terrorists.”
Social media activists say the deal means TikTok’s content is now controlled by US investors who want to silence TikTok users’ opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and will help Israel repair its image and whitewash its war crimes.
But How?
The deal will give Oracle’s billionaire pro-Trump Jewish-American Larry Ellison the power to impose his anti-Palestinian agenda over the content that TikTok users see.
Ellison has documented agenda of both suppressing voices critical of Israel and supporting the Israeli military that has killed more than 71,000 Palestinians in Gaza during the genocide and before the genocide even began.
Without safeguards in place, TikTok’s US operations could soon become an exercise in blocking users from seeing and reacting to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the major US ally.
Ellison is a major donor to the Israeli military — in 2017, he donated $16.6 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces(FIDF), what was at the time the nonprofit’s largest single donation ever — as well as a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Catz, who stepped down as Oracle’s CEO in September 2025, said while unveiling a new Oracle data center in Jerusalem in 2021, “I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.”
Larry’s son, David Ellison, is the CEO of Skyance Media that recently merged with Paramount in a deal valued at $8 billion. That merger gave the Ellison’s control over CBS News, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and even Paramount Pictures. As part of that merger, right-wing media personality Barry Weiss, an anti-Palestinian, self-described Zionist fanatic, was appointed as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Ellison has openly celebrated AI’s ability to surveil people, pronouncing in 2024 that “citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
“I feel a deep emotional connection to the State of Israel and the Israeli people,” Ellison said at the 2014 FIDF gala. “We love the country of Israel and we’ll do everything we can to support the country of Israel,” he added, with his “we” seeming to refer to Oracle.
Also, Ellison is one of several hundred prosecution witnesses in Netanyahu’s corruption trial. His name reportedly came up in two of the cases and a report said he lobbied and convinced Israeli mogul Arnon Milchan to drop his lawyer so Netanyahu could hire him.
Ellison is also a backer of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and has given or pledged at least $348 million to Blair’s Institute for Global Change. Blair is now part of Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” in Gaza which includes billionaires and figures close to Israel at the top.
Leaked emails published in Responsible Statecraft also reveal that in 2015, Oracle’s then-CEO Safra Catz urged former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to be a consulting producer for a TV show about the Israeli military to shape US public opinion in Israel’s favor and combat the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
“We believe that we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture,” the Israeli-born Catz told Barak. As a top Oracle executive, Catz likely “oversaw much of the negotiations involving the TikTok purchase,” notes Responsible Statecraft.
TikTok’s CEO, Adam Presser, told the World Jewish Congress that the platform bans criticizm of Zionists. He said that while users can declare they are “proud Zionists,” describing someone as a Zionist in a derogatory way is classified as hate speech.
“Algorithms Controlled by Billionaires”
Following the announcement of the purchase of TikTok, social media users have rushed to join UpScrolled.
What Is UpScrolled?
Christensen told Quds News Network that Upscrolled “solves a problem that nearly every internet user finds themselves in- their platforms and algorithms have been bought and controlled by billionaires.”
It is a social media platform and mobile app designed as an alternative to mainstream networks like Instagram, X and TikTok. According to the website, it emphasizes free expression, transparency, and fairness by avoiding hidden algorithms, shadowbanning, and unfair content suppression.
The lesson we need to learn from TikTok and X, said Christensen, is that “as soon as we start changing the narrative on these platforms, a billionaire will swoop in to keep us in check. That can’t happen anymore. It has to be done. Leave the billionaires behind.”
Issam Hijazi is the founder and CEO of UpScrolled. He is described as a Palestinian-Australian developer with experience in major tech environments and leadership roles. Hijazi launched the platform out of frustration with how major social networks manage speech and content visibility.
The idea for UpScrolled emerged in late 2023 when Hijazi observed meaningful stories and voices supporting Palestine and against Israeli genocide disappearing or being de-prioritized on existing social platforms.
Hijazi, who lost more than 60 of his relatives in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, launced the app last year and was motivated to create a platform that “fights against biased algorithms,” said Christensen.
“He was motivated to create this vision to fight biased algorithms after he watched his family and people be erased in real life and in the algorithms. He knows what being erased is like, and he won’t let that happen to you.”
It it is the first social media that “promises not to sell its people out, no billionaire ownership, no biased algorithms, no data scraping, and most of all no censorship. You can build long-term community on a place like Upscrolled because you are truly in charge of your platform.”
UpScrolled is ranked ninth among free apps on Apple’s App Store, one place ahead of TikTok, and second in the social networking category as of Monday afternoon. The app has reached fifth place in the United States, sixth in Australia, and eighth in the UK App Store rankings.
The most active region on the platform right now is reportedly the United States.
The app supports short videos, video editing, and text posts.
Christensen said the “forced sale” of TikTok in the US was pushed by Israel in order to “silence anti-Israel content”, adding the deal was Netanyah’s “number one” for Israel’s war on information.
A New Era of Control Over TikTok Begins
TikTok users are now reporting that messages criticizing Trump are being blocked by the platform. Phrases such as “Epstein,” “ICE agents are Nazis,” and “genocide” are reportedly censored and banned.
“TikTok is now state-controlled media,” wrote one user on X.
Source: QNN, The Intercept, BBC, Truthout, UpScrolled
