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larry ellison
Award-Winning Palestinian Journalist Banned From TikTok After Trump-Backed Investor Takeover
The ban of journalist Bisan Owda comes amid an alleged wave of censorship after the platform was taken over by a clique of Trump-aligned investors, including the pro-Israel megadonor Larry Ellison.
Jan 29, 2026
Bisan Owda is still alive, but not on TikTok.
The award-winning Palestinian journalist and filmmaker found that her social media account had been suddenly terminated days ago, as part of an alleged wave of censorship following the platform's formal takeover by American investors last Thursday.
“TikTok deleted my account. I had 1.4 million followers there, and I have been building that platform for four years,” the 28-year-old Owda said in a video posted to her other social media accounts on Wednesday, just days after TikTok's new owners assumed control.
“I expected that it would be restricted," she said, "not banned forever."
Owda had achieved a massive following for her daily vlogs documenting life amid Israel's genocide in the Gaza Strip. She showed herself constantly on the move, one of the nearly 2 million residents in the strip forcibly displaced by the military onslaught, and gave viewers a firsthand account of Israel's attacks on hospitals, its leveling of neighborhoods, and its assassinations of journalists.
Each of them began with the signature phrase: "It's Bisan from Gaza, and I'm still alive."
A documentary with that title, produced with the Al Jazeera media network, won multiple awards, including an Emmy in 2024 for news and documentary filmmaking.
Owda's videos, which are mostly in English, gave Western audiences a humanizing glimpse into the lives of Palestinian people victimized by the war. She was one of many Palestinians who shared their stories on platforms like TikTok, which American legislators blamed for the titanic shift in youth public opinion against Israel since the genocide began in October 2023.
In 2024, then-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) infamously justified the bipartisan push to ban the platform by decrying the "overwhelming" volume of "mentions of Palestinians" on it.
Others, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is now the secretary of state, expressed similar sentiments that TikTok was a critical front in an information war for the minds of young people.
In the video announcing her ban, Owda drew attention to comments by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said in September that social media was the most important "battlefield" on which Israel needed to engage.
Netanyahu said the "most important purchase" going on at the time was the sale of TikTok from the Chinese company ByteDance to American investors, which had been enforced via an executive order from US President Donald Trump.
Among those investors was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who now holds both a 15% stake in TikTok and the primary responsibility for data security and algorithm oversight. In addition to being a major donor to Republican causes, Ellison describes himself as having a "deep emotional connection to the state of Israel," has been listed as the largest private donor to Israeli military causes, and is a close personal friend of Netanyahu.
Other major stakeholders include the US-based private equity firm Silver Lake, which has close ties to Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and the Emirati investment firm MGX, which contributed an unprecedented $2 billion in a deal to help Trump's lucrative cryptocurrency startup, World Liberty Financial.
Owda also highlighted comments made by Adam Presser, the new CEO of TikTok, describing changes he'd help to make to the platform while working as its head of operations in the US that limited use of the word "Zionist" in a negative context.
"We made a change to designate the use of the term 'Zionist' as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech," Presser said. "So if someone were to use 'Zionist,' of course, you can use it in the sense of you're a proud Zionist. But if you're using it in the context of degrading somebody, calling somebody a Zionist as a dirty name, then that gets designated as hate speech to be moderated against."
The apparent censorship of Owda comes as many other users report that their content critical of the Trump administration has been throttled in the days following the takeover by the new owners.
Users have found themselves unable to upload content critical of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and unable to send direct messages containing the word "Epstein," referring to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, whose relationship with Trump has come under scrutiny of late.
TikTok's owners have denied censoring content, blaming the issues on a power outage at an Oracle data center.
Following these reports, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom launched an investigation into whether the platform was censoring anti-Trump content.
According to CNBC, the daily average number of users deleting TikTok has shot up by 150% since the new owners took over.
Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of users have flocked to a new platform called UpScrolled, which was launched in July 2025 by Palestinian-Australian app developer Issam Hijazi, who said he created it as a counter to the overwhelming presence of pro-Israel content on established platforms.
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#TakeBackTikTok From Ellison to Let Palestine Live
Billionaire Larry Ellison's takeover of US TikTok is a clear attempt to censor pro-Palestine content on the popular social media app. Here's how users can fight back.
Jan 13, 2026
CODEPINK co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans call on TikTokers across the world to flood the platform for Palestine to #TakeBackTikTok from billionaire Larry Ellison, the media mogul soon to control TikTok’s US app.
“We don’t have Ellison’s billions, his private Hawaiian island, or his cushy ties with Trump, but we do have people power on a platform with two billion users worldwide who warn against suppressing posts for Palestine,” said Benjamin, who has nearly 300,000 followers on TikTok.
“Time to school the billionaire yachtsman in uncharted waters,” said Evans, who organized a picket in front of Paramount, an Ellison family asset, to protest subsidiary CBS hiring Israel flack Bari Weiss to head the network’s news division.
The elder Ellison, 81, chair of the board at Oracle, may think he’s the smartest guy in the virtual room come January 22, when US-TikTok busts out of the social media gate to detach from TikTok globally. Ellison may be gloating about the fact that the new stand-alone consortium—prompted by China-phobic legislation—will center Oracle and UAE investors with AI at the ready to suppress pro-Palestinian content on a platform that LOVES Palestine. Ellison, who has donated over $26 billion to the Israeli military, may—when CODEPINK isn’t looking—even wink across the ocean to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
With Israel on trial at the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza, someone in the Zionist camp had to call 911 to overhaul the narrative on a platform with 170 million fans in the US.
These guys go back.
In 2021, Ellison offered pal Netanyahu a seat on the Oracle Board and a lounge chair on Ellison’s island of Lanai in Hawaii. That same year in Jerusalem, Oracle built a $319 million underground data bunker—hardened against a missile strike—to provide Netanyahu and the Israeli military with cloud services for intelligence on Palestinians and integration of information from drones and satellites for Israel’s killing fields.
At first glance, Ellison has much to celebrate as Israeli state propaganda prepares to saturate the new US TikTok with its official tourism tagline, “Israel, Exactly Like Nowhere Else." If the propaganda on TikTok mirrors advertising on other social media platforms, one can expect to hear denials in multiple languages that Israel is starving Gaza. Such claims, however, contradict United Nations findings (December 2025) that over a million people still face crisis levels of hunger, with over 100,000 children expected to suffer extreme malnutrition.
With Israel on trial at the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza, someone in the Zionist camp had to call 911 to overhaul the narrative on a platform with 170 million fans in the US.
For Israel flag wavers, this was an emergency.
TikTokers Rock for Palestine
TikTokers in the United States favor Palestine vs. Israel posts 17-to-1, according to Northeastern University research conducted from 2023-2025. TikTok posts of orphaned Gaza amputees wandering amid apartments turned to rubble make Israel a tough sell to Gen-Z and younger millennials scrolling the app to witness Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine in between ads for panda drums and shimmering lipsticks.
Netanyahu, facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Gaza’s mass starvation, openly acknowledges the importance of counteracting the images of carnage on social media. “Weapons change over time... the most important ones are on social media, “ Netanyahu said during a September 2025, huddle with US social media influencers who might be willing to promote Israel’s image for $7,000 a post. During the meeting, Netanyahu identified TikTok as the No. 1 influencer of global public opinion of Israel.
In June, 2025, the Pew Research Center, noting a dramatic shift in public opinion, found that 60% of those surveyed in 24 countries did not favor Israel over Palestine; in the US, Israel’s biggest weapons supplier, 53% expressed a “somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Israel,” with 69% of Democrats and 27% of Republicans turning thumbs down on Israel. In what should be a wake-up call to Israel shills in the White House and Congress, Pew spotlights younger Republicans under 50, who are now about as “likely to have a negative view of Israel as a positive one.”
Background
In 2024, Congress passed legislation to force TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, launched by Chinese entrepreneurs, to sell off its US app or face a ban in the land of the not-so-free US. President Donald Trump, Ellison’s chum, then issued an executive order to delay the sale of TikTok’s US platform until Oracle and ByteDance could work out the kinks to enable Oracle to host US data on its cloud server and retrain the algorithm leased from ByteDance for US auditors to police. Lots of moving parts here.
Under the US joint venture, majority ownership will rest in the hands of Oracle, MGX, (UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund), and Silver Lake, a US private equity firm with ties to UAE investors. Existing ByteDance investors (General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Soft Bank, and more) will be among the minority owners, along with ByteDance founders and employees. The Congress that kicked and screamed about foreign influence, imagining Chinese spies behind every TikTok post, barely shrugged when the UAE surveillance state teamed up with Ellison to siphon off US TikTok.
Follow the Billions and the Acquisitions… If You Can
The Ellison family holds an estimated 40-41% of Oracle’s outstanding 1.16 billion stock shares in a family trust controlled by patriarch Larry Ellison. Through the trust, the elder Ellison provided a $40.4 billion guarantee to finance the merger of Skydance Media, owned by son David, with the Paramount entertainment conglomerate. With the Ellisons’ shares in Oracle, Skydance Media, and Paramount, the family’s media dynasty can—left unchallenged—propagandize for Israel and Trump at CBS, Paramount Pictures, Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Pluto TV, and Paramount+—and soon TikTok.
TikTok content creators and users could outsmart the Ellisons by flooding the platform with pro-Palestinian posts and comments in “algospeak” or coded language.
CODEPINK, hardly new to media activism, ramps up for the challenge.The LA chapter recently joined Entertainment Labor 4 Palestine to demonstrate outside Paramount-CBS studios in Hollywood. Activists waved signs that read, “CANCEL PARAMOUNT” and “PARAMOUNT/CBS BLACKLISTS PRO-PALESTINE WORKERS” and “BARI WEISS CENSORS TRUTH” as Evans and the crowd tried to deliver a petition in objection to the CBS News editor’s cancellation of an expose on CECOT, the Salvadoran torture prison where Trump sent migrants—beaten by batons—to languish in windowless cells.
“You cannot stay on the property… Back on the sidewalk,” ordered the guards to CODEPINK.
Flood the platform
TikTok content creators and users could outsmart the Ellisons by flooding the platform with pro-Palestinian posts and comments in “algospeak” or coded language, some of which is already popular on TikTok. A Palestine demonstration becomes a “music festival.” Israel’s genocide becomes “Isrel G-side.” Gaza becomes “G@za.” Dead becomes “unalived.” Palestine become P*l3stine, with symbols and numbers replacing letters.
“Flood the platform for Palestine” was the message that the #TakeBacKTikTok campaign projected one December night onto the building of Oracle’s UK headquarters. The “Keep Posting, Keep Talking, Keep Sharing” call to action wrapped up a bold three-minute projection of life-sized images of tortured half-naked Palestinians, cratered apartment buildings, and terrified children in Gaza.
Also projected were images of Ellison, Netanyahu, Trump, and pro-Palestinian social media influencer Guy Christensen, 19, “yourfavoriteguy” who has amassed 3.5 million TikTok followers and endorsed the US #TakeBackTikTok campaign to flood the platform for Palestine in the run-up and emergence of US TikTok as a stand-alone app. While months ago ByteDance hired a former Israel Defense Forces instructor to monitor content at TikTok, Christensen views the new US joint venture as an attempt to double-down on censorship.
”What will it take for Americans to rise up against Israel’s blatant takeover of the last remaining major social media platform?” Christensen asks on his Substack.
Benjamin shares his outrage after receiving TikTok messages that read, “Not eligible for recommendation” when her posts are presumably deemed too controversial or sensitive for wider distribution. “TikTok has already been blocking our content when we simply call for an end to genocide. Enough! The new owners must stop, not escalate, the censorship,” said Benjamin.
Options for organizing
- Building a strategic partnership: MGX, the UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund, and Silver Lake investors are, like Oracle, intent on deployment of AI across social media, much to the chagrin of US-based TikTok workers in California, New York, Washington, and Texas who fear losing their jobs to AI. Unlike TikTok proletarians in the UK, workers based in the US are not unionized—yet. Seeking union representation from United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) and Communication Workers of America (CWA), TikTok content monitors and e-commerce sales reps, some of whom may be offered stock in the emerging US spin-off, are likely allies to buck the bosses and outsmart the algorithm to keep Palestine alive on TikTok.
- Skirting US TikTok to go global: Should the new US TikTok hide or ban most pro-Palstine posts, even those with coded language and watermelon emojis, savvy TikTokers may skirt around the ban, opening up accounts on Private Virtual Networks to access the TikTok seen by much of the world—particularly Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—where TikTok is most popular. Such VPN’s can place content creators in another region of the globe—not in Los Angeles or Dallas where they may live, but in Cairo or Tokyo, beyond the reach of a customized and sanitized US TikTok with Pinocchio-type ads that scream, “Israel is not starving Gaza” while Palestinians boil weeds for dinner.
- Abandoning TikTok to encourage a hostile take-over: TikTokers could abandon the platform for Upscrolled, a pro-Palestinian site; Bluesky, a decentralized open source platform; RedNote, a Chinese version of Instagram; Reddit, a discussion platform for niche communities; or Facebook and Instagram, provided owner Meta drops its habit of rigging the algorithm to suppress Palestine posts. There could also be a migration of TikTokers to YouTube reels, although that, too, would present challenges in the wake of Google, YouTube’s owner, signing a $45 million deal with Israel to run ads that show thriving food markets with the message, “There is food in Gaza.”
Content creators abandoning US TikTok could trigger an exodus of advertisers in search of the migrating Gen Z demographic. Advertiser flight could, in turn, undermine or bankrupt a platform that generated $39 billion in revenue for ByteDance in 2024.
With users and advertisers abandoning a highly censored platform, TikTok could go to the graveyard with MySpace, an early social networking platform that alienated users with wall-to-wall advertising. Even UAE sheiks would hate to lose money in the long run on a hollowed-out US spin-off that cost the consortium $14 billion to buy from ByteDance.
Would the UAE or others with beaucoop bucks ever encourage US counterparts to launch a hostile takeover to purge Oracle from US TikTok? It could happen. Look at the Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) battle, in which Paramount launched an unsuccessful hostile bid to block Netflix’s acquisition. Although TikTok is not publicly traded, Oracle trades on the NYSE and could be vulnerable to internal pressure and shareholder activism.
Bidding wars, platform censorship, and billionaire media ownership could also amplify demands on Congress to outlaw media consolidation under a future US administration sympathetic to regulation.
Larry Ellison may not be the smartest guy in the room, after all.
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The First Year of Trump's Second Term Was Terrific—for US Billionaires
Over 2025, the combined wealth of all US billionaires climbed to $8.1 trillion, a 21% increase over 2025, up from $6.7 trillion exactly a year ago.
Jan 02, 2026
The first year of the Trump administration was a very happy new year for the US billionaire class. The richest 15 billionaires, all with assets more than $100 billion, saw their combined wealth surge 33%, from $2.4 trillion to $3.2 trillion. This is double the growth of the S&P 500 over 2025, which was 16.4%.
Over 2025, the combined wealth of all US billionaires climbed to $8.1 trillion, a 21% increase over 2025, up from $6.7 trillion exactly a year ago.
Based on an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data from the Forbes real time billionaire list from 2025, there are 935 billionaires in the United States with combined wealth totaling $8.1 trillion at the close of 2025 markets. This is an increase from 813 US billionaires at end close of 2024 markets, with combined wealth of $6.7 trillion.
The richest three American wealth dynasties—the Waltons, Mars, and Koch families—saw their wealth accelerate from $657.8 billion to $757 billion in one year.
Many top billionaires have seen their wealth surge during and after the Covid-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020.
[Note: Bloomberg reported global billionaire wealth increased $2.2 trillion over 2025, in an analysis released several days before the market closed at 4:00 p.m. on December 31, 2025. The market fluctuated considerably in the final days of 2025.]
The top five current billionaires and their individual wealth on January 1, 2026, compared to January 1, 2025:
- Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $726 billion, up from $421 trillion a year ago.
- Larry Page of Google, with $257 billion, up from $156 billion a year ago.
- Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $245.billion, up from $209 billion a year ago.
- Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $242.billion, up from $233.5 billion a year ago.
- Sergey Brin of Google with $237 billion, up from $148.9 billion a year ago.
The three wealthiest dynastic families in the US hold an estimated $757 billion, up from $657.8 billion at the end of 2024, a 16% gain. These are:
- Walton. Seven members of the Walton Family with combined wealth of $483 billion, up from $404.3 billion a year ago.
- Mars. Six members of Mars family with combined wealth of $120 billion, down from $130.4 billion a year ago.
- Koch. Two members of Koch family have a combined wealth of $154.8 billion, up from $121.1 billion a year ago.
Wealth Gains Since Beginning of Pandemic
Many top billionaires have seen their wealth surge during and after the Covid-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020.
On March 18, 2020, Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. Less than five years later, at the end of 2025, Musk’s wealth is $726 billion, a dizzying 2,800% increase from before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Jeff Bezos saw his wealth rise from $113 billion on March 18, 2020 to $242 billion at the end of 2025.
Three Walton family members—Jim, Alice, and Rob, saw their combined assets increase from $161.1 billion on March 18, 2020 to $378 billion at the end of 2025.
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