Fast Company: “TikTok’s U.S. operations are now managed by a new American joint venture, ending a long-standing debate over whether the app would be permanently banned in the United States. The good news for TikTok users is that this deal guarantees that the app will continue to operate within America’s borders. But there’s some bad news, too. Successive U.S. administrations—both Biden’s and Trump’s—argued that TikTok posed a national security threat to America and its citizens, partly because of the data the app collected about them. While all social media apps collect data about their users, officials argued that TikTok’s data collection was a danger (while, say, Facebook’s was not) because the world’s most popular short-form video app was owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. The ironic thing is that TikTok will actually collect more data about them now than it did under ByteDance ownership. The company’s new mostly American owners—Larry Ellison’s Oracle, private equity company Silver Lake, and the Emirati investment company MGX—made this clear in a recent update to TikTok’s privacy policy and its terms of service. If this new data collection unnerves you, there are some things you can do to mitigate it…”

See also The Atlantic – The New Shadowbanning Panic Is TikTok censoring users on behalf of the Trump administration? “Over the past several days, TikTok users have found themselves at a loss. Literally, I mean: They lost their audiences, and their view counts showed “0.” Some people who attempted to upload content about anti-ICE protests or the killing of Alex Pretti alleged that the platform was intentionally blocking them from doing so. Others were able to get their videos uploaded, but alleged that TikTok was not distributing them. Still others noticed that they were unable to send the word Epstein in a direct message, a quirk so bizarre that it incited California Governor Gavin Newsom to repost a screenshot shared by an anonymous X account using the handle @intelligentpawg…”