Americans are baffled to discover TikTok is more censored under US ownership than it ever was under China.

turns out all that sinophobic scaremongering was just projection.

Good day, spectators,

And there is a supreme irony unfolding before our eyes, one so perfect it could only have been scripted by the Empire itself. For years, the United States government waged a holy war against the social media platform TikTok, cloaking its aggression in the sacred vestments of ‘national security’ and ‘free speech’. The villain, they always claimed, was its Chinese ownership, a foreign adversary that might hypothetically harvest your data or, even more terrifying, manipulate what you see. The solution, they decreed, was to tear the platform from Beijing’s grasp and hand it over to some trustworthy, all-American, yankee doodle patriots.

And they did that. In a deal credited by Donald Trump, TikTok was forcibly transferred to a new US-based entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, governed by a board of American directors and heavily influenced by Trump ally and giga Zionist Larry Ellison’s company, Oracle. The government declared victory. The great red menace had been purged from your For You page. Their version of freedom had been secured.

But the punchline has now arrived, and it’s a brutal but hilarious one. Americans are now discovering, in real time, the oldest colonial trick in the book: liberation under the empire is merely a synonym for a more efficient occupation. The ‘free’ TikTok which is now proudly flying Uncle Sam’s stars and stripes, is proving to be infinitely more censorious, more politically compromised, and more hostile to its own users than the Chinese-owned version could ever be.

the great unmasking.

The new Terms of Service landed, buried in the usual miles of impenetrable lawyer-speak, but their intent was clear. The app now explicitly reserves the right to collect a dystopian catalogue of your most sensitive data: ‘racial or ethnic origin’, ‘sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status’. The irony is, from my perspective, quite simply delicious: the platform was wrested from China over fears of data harvesting, only for its American stewards to formalise the practice in writing.

Then, the censorship began. Not the covert, hypothetical manipulation Washington feared from Beijing, but overt, clumsy suppression. Creators posting about the police killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota found their videos throttled to zero views. Comedian Megan Stalter reported being unable to upload content for hours. Political commentator The Tennessee Holler saw multiple new videos stuck at zero views. When Billie Eilish exposed her brother’s censored video on Instagram, it suddenly amassed hundreds of thousands of likes and this seems to be proof the suppression was deliberate, not algorithmic.

two creators affected by the censorship, their crimes likely being that they posted something the Empire doesn’t like.

This is the new ‘editorial discretion’: a blunt instrument wielded against dissent.

Most telling, though, is the ideological litmus test now being applied. As reports confirm, the platform’s new management has drawn a stark line: users can declare themselves ‘a proud Zionist’, but using the term ‘Zionist’ in a negative context is classified as hate speech and will get you banned.

Watch: New TikTok CEO Adam Presser openly admits they are censoring critics of Israel and Zionism.

Let’s take a moment to ponder that. A political ideology that is currently inextricably linked to a state currently carrying out genocide genocide is granted protected status. Criticism of that ideology is deemed impermissible.

Apparently, you are not allowed to use the term ‘Epstein’ or ‘Epstein files' either:

The mask of ‘content neutrality’, so carefully worn during the Supreme Court hearings, has fully dropped to show us all this is about enforcing a political orthodoxy.

the backlash and the irony.

Some American users, in a rare moment of collective clarity, have revolted. Deleting the app in protest has surged by nearly 150% since the takeover. Creators with hundreds of thousands of followers are walking away, declaring ‘the end of that era’. They’re fleeing to new platforms like UpScrolled, founded by a Palestinian man and which explicitly promises no ‘censorship, shadowbans, hidden throttling, or pay-to-play favouritism’. The very community the US government claimed to be protecting is now voting with its fingers against that ‘protection’.

This is the hypocrisy. The US state spent years, millions in legal fees, and immense political capital to ‘save’ Americans from the spectre of foreign influence. The result? An app that tracks your immigration status for potential ICE referrals, shadowbans critics of state violence, and formally bans criticism of a key US ally’s founding ideology. The self professed land of free speech has turned out to be a tightly patrolled company town.

They told you the problem was a foreign algorithm. The problem was never the algorithm. The problem was, and always has been, who controls the off-switch? Under ByteDance, the off-switch was in Beijing, a continent away, and the primary fear was crude data collection. Under the new American ownership, the off-switch is in the hands of a political class with direct, immediate interests in shaping domestic narratives, crushing dissent, and supporting allied regimes. The censorship is no longer a hypothetical risk from a vague adversary but a daily, verified reality administered by your own ruling class.

They didn’t free TikTok from authoritarian control. They simply imported the authoritarianism and rebranded it in patriotic colours. The users are finally seeing the code behind the propaganda, and they’re finding it dodgy as hell. The funniest joke of all is that it took an American takeover for everyone to realise the Chinese version was the freer one.

The next time they promise to liberate you from a foreign bogeyman you need to be checking to see who they have lined up to insert under your bed afterwards. You might just find they have a very familiar accent.

And on that note, I’ll let you go for today, please consider dropping a tip below if you enjoy the spectacle as I could really use your support this month.

(And as always, thanks for reading, make sure to subscribe and do please give this post a ❤️ and restack below too.)

I need your support:

Please consider leaving a small tip below to support the magazine. If even just 10% of people reading this post tipped just *one* time a month, I could dedicate myself to this work full time and expand to bring you even more unfiltered, independent stories, every single day.

Alternatively, commit to supporting the spectacle as we reach 10,000 subscribers by becoming a paid subscriber to to receive articles one day earlier and get full access to the archives and ‘microscope’ long reads section.

Every contribution counts and is deeply appreciated. Thank you for being part of this community.

---

Read more from the magazine:

the Empire closes its fist on Iran as it makes final preparations to strike.

Trump’s circus of ‘peace’ in Gaza is a cash grab and blueprint for occupation.

Trump’s circus of ‘peace’ in Gaza is a cash grab and blueprint for occupation.