TikTok was sold to the U.S. due to fears regarding the Chinese company ByteDance selling data. The decision was made by a joint venture, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.
According to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, a joint venture is a combination of two or more parties that seek the development of a single enterprise or project for profit, sharing the risks associated with its development.
The joint venture is formed by companies such as Oracle, a leading American business for cloud platforms and MGX, based in the United Arab Emirates.
This new change in ownership was finalized on Jan. 22.
USDS Joint Venture LLC now owns 80.1% of TikTok. ByteDance owns 19.9%.
Along with the new deal taking place, users began to experience outages all throughout the app, such as videos not reaching intended audiences and unusual videos crowding their feeds.
Brandon Vigliarolo, a reporter for The Register, goes into detail about the updates and concerns about the new ownership.
“Some TikTok users noted the outage coincided with the federal [I.C.E.] agent’s fatal shooting of a second American, this time Alex Pretti,” Vigliarolo said. “[Users] speculated that it was an attempt to restrict the flow of information about the incident.”
Vigliarolo said that he contacted a TikTok USDS Joint Venture spokesperson, who highlighted that TikTok’s guidelines have not changed and emphasized that they intend to stay the same under the new ownership.
Despite the denial of new guidelines and restrictions, some users have experienced their videos not reaching “for you pages,” which is the main form of contact among users.
Bryanna Ofose, a pre-nursing major here at Chico State, said that her “for you pages” started showing weeks-old videos that were unrelated with her normal content.
“I started hitting the uninterested button on the videos,” Ofose said. “Unfortunately, I still see them sometimes, or there are a lot more ads. Sometimes it lags so bad that I have to close the app.”
Ofose said that she has started to see a significant amount of political videos, more than she’d seen in the past.
Content creators across TikTok experienced roadblocks when trying to post their daily videos, such as getting no views even after they had been posted for a while.
Luciana Lewis, a psychology and child development double major at Chico State, said she also experienced unrelated content in her for you page.
“I have noticed that pages talking about [President] Trump’s administration in a negative light had been censored in a way that their view count has been incredibly low despite their page having thousands of followers,” Lewis said.
Other users are experiencing restrictions on what they can send in the direct messaging portion of the app. Pop Base, a social news account on X, posted a thread about a specific word getting restricted only in the U.S.
“TikTok now censors the word ‘Epstein’ when mentioned in DMs by users in the U.S.,” Pop Base said. “Currently, the word is not being filtered for users in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world.”
Before the deal was finalized, Michael Tognotti, a mechanical engineering major at Chico State, spotted something unusual on his feed.
“There was a controversy where a TikTok shop ad recommended a swastika necklace,” Tognotti said. “and all you could do was scroll or say not interested; there was no option to report it.”
All images of the necklace have since been removed, but this controversial event happened around Christmas time last year, 2025.
On Truth Social, President Donald Trump stated that TikTok will now be owned by a great group of American patriots and investors, which he described as the biggest in the world.
“I only hope that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok,” Trump said proudly.
Elizabeth Perez can be reached at [email protected]
