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 22nd, 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 million to the Israeli military, may–when CODEPINK isn’t looking– even wink across the ocean to Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu.

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 UN findings (Dec., 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 U.S. 

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 on TikTok, 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 number one 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. 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.

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 IDF 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

1st Option: 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 proletariats 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

2nd Option: 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

3rd Option: TikTokers could abandon the platform for Upscrolled, a pro-Palestinian site, Blue Sky, 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 algorithim 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 take-over 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 U.S. administration  sympathetic to regulation. 

Larry Ellison may not be the smartest guy in the room, after all.

Marcy Winograd’s TikTok profile reads, “Organizing for Palestine & liberation in teacher spaces.” A retired public high school English and government teacher, Marcy co-produces CODEPINK Radio and coordinates CODEPINK’s Drop the ADL campaign.

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