In 2020, only a tiny fraction of Americans got news from TikTok. These days, that number has soared to one in five.
For young adults, those figures are much higher, with almost half of adults under 30 getting news there, according to the Pew Research Center.
But who will own that hugely influential purveyor of information?
As with so much of American media – from television networks to some of the largest newspapers – the answer is shaping up to be as simple and short as a TikTok video: the ultra-rich.
As President Trump moved this week to clear the path to sell the platform’s US assets to a group of American investors, the metastasizing reality of media-by-oligarchy threatened to become even more extreme.
One of those investors is the billionaire and Trump donor Larry Ellison, whose son’s media company owns CBS News and is reportedly planning a bid for Warner Bros Discovery, which in turn owns CNN. Another reportedly is Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, with rightwing bona fides well-known through their control of Fox News.
The former US labor secretary Robert Reich described the situation plainly, writing this week on the platform formerly known as Twitter: “The richest man on earth owns X. The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok. The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fourth richest man owns the Washington Post.”
He was talking, of course, about Musk, Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.
We’ve already seen some of what happens when billionaires control the media – and remain committed to getting even richer and more powerful.
Bezos has dramatically turned the Washington Post opinion section to the right, as he curries favor with Trump. The Amazon co-founder killed a draft endorsement of Kamala Harris last fall, and later installed an opinion editor who has driven out some of the Post’s most esteemed journalists.
Another newspaper-owning billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiong, has changed the tenor of the opinion offerings at his newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, as he too cozies up to Trump.
It’s not just rich individuals controlling major media companies. Even local newspapers are largely – and increasingly – owned by big chains, rather than the local families who once had a stake in the communities their papers served.
It’s a story of media consolidation, power and money.
ABC News is controlled by Disney, hence the recent decisions to settle a winnable defamation suit brought by Trump and to suspend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after his on-air remarks after the murder of far-right provocateur Charlie Kirk.
With TikTok, one of the biggest questions is control of the all-important algorithm, which determines what consumers experience when they use the platform.
The deal is not done, and it has lots of moving parts.
No executive order by Trump can complete it, since the likely plan would spin off a US version of the platform from TikTok’s China-based version, owned by ByteDance. Chinese officials would still need to agree.
But the pieces are in place.
“It’s incredibly troubling how quickly media moguls are capturing the information space at a time when there’s a crackdown on speech more broadly,” Emma Briant of Notre Dame University told the Washington Post. As she sees it, they are “grabbing and seeking to control more and more of the infrastructure through which political debate happens”.
Or, increasingly, through which political debate doesn’t happen. While self-censorship is hard to measure, such ownership moves can encourage decision-makers inside these influential companies to pull their punches instead of reporting without fear or favor.
I have serious doubts about whether TikTok’s brief videos, intended for viral sharing, are an ideal way to get news across to the public. The format doesn’t bring tremendous nuance or context, qualities already in short supply.
But TikTok is wildly popular and influential, and – in this era of ever shorter attention spans – on the rise. It matters.
The White House has claimed that the new uber-rich American investors in TikTok are patriots who love America.
But we also know what else they love. It’s something that comes not in red, white and blue but a familiar shade of green.
