Trump's TikTok deal presents new challenge for Palestine's defenders

Larry Ellison at the Whte House — Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle, joined President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on 3 February.
Chris Kleponis CNP / Polaris

We have entered a troubling new phase in the fight against Zionist media hegemony.

In 2023 and 2024, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and AIPAC-funded politicians helped whip up a moral panic about the mobile video app TikTok’s alleged culpability in decreasing support for Israel, particularly among social media savvy young people.

This narrative seemed to breathe new life into campaigns against the app, which spanned as far back as Donald Trump’s failed 2020 attempt to ban it amidst empty fearmongering about the threat of American user data falling into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. With global indignation against Israel’s genocide following 7 October 2023 at an all-time high, an increasing number of activists and organizers have taken to digital platforms like TikTok to document their opposition to Israeli colonial atrocities.

What ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt defined as a “TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem” regarding the demise of unquestioned support for Israel mobilized fresh, bipartisan efforts against the app and its parent company ByteDance. This culminated in the Congressional bill signed into law by President Joe Biden on 24 April 2024 giving ByteDance 270 days to sell the app or face a ban in the US.

“Bipartisan” can’t be emphasized enough here. Signed into law and heavily boosted by Democrats – among them Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, who qualified his support for the ban by saying “October 7 really opened people’s eyes to what’s happening on TikTok” – the bill was introduced by Republican Representative Mike Gallagher, one of whose top donors before he decided not to run for office in 2024 was reportedly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Human rights lawyer and former UN official Craig Mokhiber hit the nail on the head when he posted in March 2024, “They are not trying to ban TikTok. They are trying to use government power to force TikTok to be taken over by pro-Israel ownership to silence criticism of genocide and apartheid.”

Fast forward to the present. Following several extensions on the ban, US President Donald Trump has announced a $14 billion deal to buy TikTok that would reportedly involve a consortium of investors including Rupert Murdoch (the right-wing media magnate whose empire includes Fox News, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal), Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, and Oracle, a software company cofounded by Larry Ellison.

None of these names bodes well for TikTok’s future utility to the Palestinian struggle. Why this is the case for Rupert Murdoch (and his son Lachlan, whom Trump also floated as a potential partner) should go without saying.

On 22 July 2025, The Electronic Intifada published an exposé on Dell Technologies’ deep entrenchment in Israel’s genocide. This included, among other damning revelations, how Dell hardware is used in running Israel’s AI-generated assassination programs “Lavender” and “The Gospel.”

But Ellison’s hitherto relative anonymity in comparison to other outsized tech moguls such as Elon Musk is inversely proportional to the grave implications his involvement in Trump’s TikTok acquisition poses for digital advocacy and activism for Palestine. As Sam Husseini reports, Ellison speaks at Israeli military galas “as though he were an Israeli citizen.”

“We’ve actually acquired a number of Israeli companies,” Husseini quotes Ellison as saying. “We have two CEOs at Oracle. One’s name is Safra Catz, and she was born in Israel. So again, we love the country of Israel and will do everything we can to support the country of Israel.”

A bombshell report from Drop Site News reveals that Ellison in fact vetted current Secretary of State Marco Rubio regarding sufficient fealty to Israel for Ron Prosor, former Israeli ambassador to the UN, during Rubio’s failed 2016 presidential cycle run. The Oracle cofounder has since become a “major patron” of Rubio, who has championed kidnapping and deportation of student critics of Israel.

Ellison, who has “given or pledged” over $350 million to the Tony Blair Institute, also boasted of arranging for Rubio to meet Blair, the former British prime minister who is under consideration to co-chair Trump’s dystopian and colonial Gaza Board of Peace.

Blair’s potential candidacy for the Orwellian “Board of Peace” is also deeply concerning given his history as a co-conspirator in the US’ 2003 war and colonial occupation of Iraq, not to mention his (strategic) failure to halt Israeli settlement expansion or advance Palestinian statehood during his time as a Middle East “peace” envoy. This outcome should come as no surprise given that Blair’s Zionism is so pronounced he also did pro bono work for the Israel lobby.

Husseini recalls that Oracle, which was cofounded by Ellison, Robert Miner and Ed Oates in 1977, has direct ties to the CIA: the intelligence agency was its first client, from one of whose projects the company’s name emerges. Former CIA director and Pentagon head Leon Panetta currently sits on the Oracle board of directors.

I believe Husseini is right in opining that we don’t “understand the ramifications” of how the databases provided by Oracle are “used by an enormous number of governments and companies.” Ellison, who champions “unifying” data, has espoused a dystopian vision of how omnipresent, AI-enabled surveillance will ensure that “citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

The convergence between Oracle’s data centers and AI is already underway, Husseini reveals, quoting independent journalist Max Jones, given that Open AI’s Stargate Project saw the AI company sign a $300 billion project with Oracle.

Back to TikTok

This is not Ellison’s first peak at the trough.

In fact, Oracle has been storing TikTok’s US data since 2020 – replacing no less a tech giant than Google in the process – and initially reached a deal with the Trump administration that same year to buy TikTok before the deal was blocked. This is Ellison’s second chance, an opportunity to gain far more than exclusive storage privileges for Oracle – with the prospect of anti-hegemonic digital support for Palestinian liberation hanging in the balance.

And the threat is multimodal: following federal approval, SkyDance Media, the media company owned by Larry Ellison’s son, David, underwent a merger with Paramount Global. The newly minted Paramount-SkyDance Corporation houses Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central, MTV and CBS News, which has now installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief following the company’s $150 million purchase of Weiss’ conservative digital outlet The Free Press.

The venture-capitalist backed publication featured such anti-Palestinian content as the widely lambasted piece, “The Gaza famine myth.” Alan MacLeod reports that Weiss was sought out for the role due to her pro-Israel views, and that Weiss’ desired candidacy for the position “mirrors” how TikTok “hired former IDF [Israeli military] soldier and Israel lobbyist, Erica Mindel, to oversee its online hate speech policy, with particular regard to anti-Semitism.”

Importantly, Weiss’ Free Press is not merely a propaganda organ; it has also established itself as a formidable tool in the Trump administration’s war on Columbia University (of which Weiss is an alum).

As David Klion argues, from its hand-picked status to announce the Trump administration’s withholding of $400 million in federal grants due to “anti-Semitism” to its publication of leaked transcripts of Zoom meetings in which Columbia officials deliberated how to respond to the Trump administration’s demands, “Weiss’ publication … was the preferred vehicle for conveying information from Columbia insiders who wanted to purge all criticism of Israel from the university to Trump administration officials who were using unprecedented financial pressure to help them do exactly that.”

Weiss also arguably put a target on the late Palestinian poet, professor and intellectual, Refaat Alareer, after he made a satirical post about Zionist genocide propaganda. “If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss and her likes,” Alareer posted on X. “Many maniacal soldiers already bombing Gaza take these smears seriously and they act upon them.”

Alareer was indeed assassinated by Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023.

“Bari Weiss – who once put a target on a Palestinian poet later killed by Israel – now leading CBS news editorial is a new stain on an already blood-soaked industry,” media critic Sana Saeed posted on X.

I have been writing at length about digital settler colonialism, a term I have repurposed to explore how digital technologies and platforms act as online extensions of the physical processes of apartheid, military occupation and genocide inherent to Zionist settler colonialism – often with the eager support of anti-democratic US business interests.

In June 2024, I wrote about how TikTok’s forced sale by the US government in light of the app’s decried role in amplifying pro-Palestinian messaging made it an important example of this phenomenon. But the initial impetus for my project relied on a functional distinction between corporate legacy media and corporate social media.

However increasingly censorious corporate social media was becoming – a fundamental issue for my book and adjacent writings – I had not anticipated a cross-medium convergence of the kind we are witnessing at present. I largely conceptualized social media censorship of Palestine as an (ultimately futile) attempt to recreate the same anti-Palestinian discursive climate so pervasive within legacy media, particularly as social media had proved itself an essential (if unpredictable) resource to advancing narratives of Palestinian liberation.

But the consolidation of industries that would be realized through the current TikTok deal, as well as the Ellisons’ new media empire under the authoritarian Trump administration, arguably suggests a new paradigm of power, with digital and legacy media consolidation unfolding at an unprecedented scale, and all under explicit collaboration between the US and Israeli governments and tech giants.

Media domination, however crude or seemingly total, cannot undo popular opposition to Israel’s genocide, but the movement must be prepared for the current reconfiguring of power in advancing the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Omar Zahzah’s new book, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle, is published by The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.