TikTok’s US arm has new owners, new rules and, right now, a serious trust problem.
As the app shifts into a majority‑American joint venture designed under Donald Trump’s executive order, users are reporting zero‑view videos, frozen feeds and many of the posts glitching out are talking about ICE and US immigration enforcement.
It’s left creators wondering whether they’re seeing teething issues from a huge technical changeover, or an early warning sign of how the new regime might handle political content.
So who owns TikTok in the US now?
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC (the new US‑controlled company) was formally announced earlier this week in a move TikTok says “has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025″.
The company says the structure “now enabl[es] more than 200 million Americans and 7.5 million businesses to continue to discover, create, and thrive” on the app.
When PEDESTRIAN.TV asked TikTok for comment on concerns about the new ownership, the company pointed us to its Newsroom announcement. In that statement, TikTok describes TikTok USDS as a “majority American owned Joint Venture” that “will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for US users”.
TikTok says the joint venture’s “mandate is to secure US user data, apps and the algorithm through comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity measures”, and that it will “safeguard the US content ecosystem through robust trust and safety policies and content moderation while ensuring continuous accountability through transparency reporting and third-party certifications”.
On data protection, TikTok states that “US user data will be protected by USDS Joint Venture in Oracle’s secure US cloud environment” and that its program will be audited by third‑party cybersecurity experts and aligned with frameworks like NIST and ISO 27001, as well as CISA requirements. The company says the recommendation system will be “retrained, test[ed], and update[d]” on US data, with the “content recommendation algorithm… secured in Oracle’s US cloud environment”.
Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX are named as three managing investors, each with 15 per cent, while a long list of other US and Europe‑linked investors holds smaller stakes. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent, retains 19.9 per cent of the joint venture. A seven‑member, majority‑American board — including Oracle executive vice president Kenneth Glueck and Silver Lake co‑CEO Egon Durban — will oversee the entity, led by CEO Adam Presser and l, both former TikTok USDS executives.
In short, TikTok is pitching this as a heavily supervised, security‑focused US operation that still plugs into the global app so creators and brands can reach audiences outside America.
What changes with data and the algorithm?
Cyber security expert Professor Matthew Warren told PEDESTRIAN.TV that the biggest shift is who has their hands on TikTok’s secret sauce — the recommendation system that decides what people see.
“In 2025, the US House of Representatives passed bipartisan legislation forcing TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the popular social media platform or face a total US ban. The sale is now being completed in 2026,” he said, noting the long political build‑up behind the deal. “The most significant change is that the new owners will have access to the content algorithms, enabling them to reduce fake news and harmful content.”
Those new owners have close ties to Trump, which has created a fresh set of concerns about whether political influence could shape what the algorithm boosts or buries.
TikTok’s updated US terms point to “new types of location information (including device geolocation)” that it may collect with permission, alongside changes to how information can be used to show ads outside the app. Warren told P.TV that “ByteDance’s powerful AI and data analytics capabilities allow it to determine trends for entire countries” and that the “new US owners will likely possess [those capabilities] as well for the USA”.
He stressed TikTok can already tap “extensive phone data including cameras, microphones, contacts, other apps, and location information”, but believes “the new US owners are expected to be less aggressive in data harvesting than their Chinese predecessors”.
On Oracle’s role, Warren said: “Oracle would apply the same security controls and features to US TikTok as it does for its other corporate customers. This approach primarily improves control over which entities (particularly non-US actors) can access the data.”
For Australians, Warren warned that “in the current form under ByteDance TikTok does pose a risk for all Australians due to the app’s potential for excessive data collection, fake news and harmful content”, and suggested that “as the Australian government has a duty of care to protect all citizens from risks including cyber threats, a logical next step would be adopting the new US version of TikTok”.
Where the ICE glitch fears come in
All of this ownership reshuffle and data‑governance language would have already make people nervous. Then, days after TikTok USDS launched, the app started breaking — and a lot of the affected videos were talking about ICE.
Over the past few days, US creators have reported uploads stuck at zero views, endlessly “processing”, or dropping off feeds altogether. Outage tracker Downdetector told BBC that they had logged hundreds of thousands of reports from users whose videos suddenly weren’t going anywhere. Reddit communities warned people not to delete “zero view” posts, arguing it looked like a platform‑wide technical fault instead of normal low reach.
Among the voices raising alarms were creators talking about US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Comedian Meg Stalter told her followers on Instagram that she had deleted TikTok after feeling content was “being completely censored and monitored”, explaining that a video she made condemning ICE raids following the police shooting of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti never made it onto the platform.
TikToker Chris Olsen said he also experienced views jail and glitches on his videos after being vocal about the situation in Minnesota on the app this week. “I’m being very careful because I don’t know what we can even say on here anymore,” he said in a video.
Other TikTokers told CNN that videos mentioning ICE or critical of Trump sat on zero views for hours while their non‑political content posted around the same time perfomr normally, feeding into the idea that the glitches weren’t random. Posts in pro‑migrant and watchdog communities described anti‑ICE clips getting stuck under review or silently vanishing, just as the new US joint venture took control.
Many Australian users, including this writer, also experienced glitches on videos about ICE, although PEDESTRIAN.TV was not able to independently verify that this was only happening on videos speaking on immigration and politics.
Since the joint venture was announced, the daily average of US users deleting the app has jumped by nearly 150 per cent compared with the previous three months, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The glitches, new data terms and fears about political influence aren’t just abstract worries anymore, but are already changing how people use — or walk away from — the platform.
TikTok says it’s a power outage, not censorship
TikTok US has pushed back on the censorship claims and says the timing is awful but coincidental. In a statement to BBC News, a spokesperson said the issues stemmed from “a power outage at one of its US data centres” and that the company had “made significant progress in recovering our US infrastructure with our US data centre partner”, while warning that “the US user experience may still have some technical issues, including when posting new content”.
The company described what happened as a “cascading systems failure” in its US infrastructure that caused some videos and analytics to display incorrectly, including showing zero views even when they had been delivered, and stressed that “data and content engagement were safe”.
Still, the optics are bad enough that California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced a probe into whether TikTok’s moderation practices unlawfully suppressed content critical of Trump, citing “confirmed instances” of posts about ICE and the Minneapolis shooting being limited in reach.
Tech ethics professor Casey Fiesler told CNN that even if the root cause is a genuine bug, the damage to trust is real. In a moment where platforms are already under suspicion, she said that in terms of how people see TikTok, “does it matter” whether the issue was deliberate or not?
What this means if you’re watching from Australia
For Australian users, the USDS’ joint venture and the ICE glitch saga are colliding into the same uneasy question: who do you trust more with your data and your speech — a Chinese‑controlled platform, or a US‑controlled one with deep links to American politics and Big Tech?
Right now, the Australian app still sits under ByteDance’s structure, and the US safeguards TikTok is talking up don’t automatically apply here. Warren’s view is that “in the current form under ByteDance” TikTok remains risky for Australians, but that shifting to the USDS model would come with its own trade‑offs around who sets the rules and how political pressure plays out.
In the meantime, users in both countries are left in the same spot: watching videos about horrible immigration measures, policing and power glitch outs just as a new, more politically plugged‑in owner steps in, and having to decide whether “cascading systems failure” is a good enough answer.
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