TDFP Review: TikTok Under Its New Owners Gets a C+
By Yossi Schmidt
For years, Washington argued about banning TikTok. Instead, the app got new American owners. On January 22, 2026, TikTok closed a deal creating TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, which now runs the app in the United States. Oracle, Silver Lake and the UAE-based investment firm MGX each hold 15 percent. ByteDance, TikTok's China-based parent, keeps 19.9 percent, and a memo from TikTok CEO Shou Chew reported by ABC News said another 30.1 percent is held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors. CEO Adam Presser, formerly TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety, leads it under a seven-member, majority-American board that includes Chew.
The deal promised new safeguards for data, the algorithm and moderation. Nine months in, I read the contract TikTok's U.S. users actually sign and compared it with X, YouTube and Meta. This review asks whether that contract lives up to the deal's promises, how TikTok handles appeals, data and complaints of unfair moderation, and what posting there has been like for The Digital Free Press (@tdfreepress). At the end, TikTok gets a report card.
Terms of Service: "For Any Reason"
TikTok's U.S. Terms of Service, last updated July 15, 2026, say the company "may remove or restrict access to any content, including yours, whether publicly or privately posted, for any reason," then list examples such as rule violations, possible harm or a legal requirement.
The Digital Free Press compared that with the pre-deal Terms (an archived copy captured December 1, 2025), which said TikTok could remove content "at any time and without prior notice" and "at our discretion for any reason or no reason." The new owners dropped "or no reason" and "without prior notice," a modest improvement, but the core power stayed, and the July 15 update did not touch it.
TikTok is not alone, but it is among the bluntest. X's Terms (effective October 9, 2026) say X may "remove or refuse to distribute any Content" and "suspend or terminate users" "without liability to you." YouTube's Terms (effective December 15, 2023) tie removal to content that "is in breach of this Agreement" or "may cause harm," and say YouTube "will notify you with the reason for our action," with exceptions. Meta's Facebook Terms (effective January 1, 2025) allow removals for rule-breaking or to avoid "adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Meta," promise to "let you know and explain any options you have to request another review," and say its Oversight Board "may review our decisions."
The difference is the promise: YouTube and Meta put notice in the contract. TikTok's Terms do not, though its Community Guidelines say, "If your content breaks a rule, we seek to explain to you why it was removed."
Content Moderation: Complaints From Both Sides
The first complaints came from the left. Days after the deal closed, users said videos about immigration raids were not loading and the word "Epstein" was blocked in direct messages. A TikTok spokesman told NPR, "We don't have rules against sharing the name 'Epstein' in direct messages." California Gov. Gavin Newsom's office said it had "independently confirmed instances" of suppressed content critical of President Trump and launched a review. The venture blamed a power outage at an Oracle data center: "It would be inaccurate to report that this is anything but the technical issues we've transparently confirmed." Researchers who studied more than 100,000 videos, NPR reported, found views of all kinds collapsed during the outage and saw no evidence of top-down political censorship, though TikTok's limited data access kept them from ruling out smaller removals. The Digital Free Press found no announced results from the Newsom review.
By September, complaints came from the right. The New York Post reported that conservative creators said their videos were being removed or demonetized ahead of the midterms while staying up on Instagram and YouTube, and three of them wrote TikTok that enforcement had become "aggressive, targeted, and unpredictable." TikTok did not respond to the Post. In an October 13 column first published by the Washington Examiner, Joel Thayer of the America First Policy Institute argued that while ownership changed, TikTok's "algorithmic gamesmanship didn't."
The complaints continued in the days before the November 3 midterms. On October 31, the whatever podcast, hosted by Brian Atlas, said on X that TikTok is "BANNING my Charlie Kirk videos where he is debating on my podcast," and that its account "now has strikes and is about to be banned," while, in its words, videos "MOCKING HIS DEATH" stay up "WITHOUT ISSUE." The post, which had drawn more than 17,000 views by the morning of November 1, included a screenshot of a TikTok notice saying a September 3 video titled "Charlie Kirk drops NUKE on whatever podcast E-GIRL?! Brian Atlas in DISBELIEF?!" was removed under TikTok's Community Guidelines, with no more specific reason given and an option to appeal. The Digital Free Press has not independently reviewed the account's strike history or the other videos the podcast describes. TDFP emailed the podcast's owner on November 1 seeking comment, with a deadline of November 3 at 5 p.m. ET. The podcast did not respond by the deadline.
Neither set of claims can be settled from the outside, because TikTok does not open its recommendation system to independent review.
Appeals and Due Process
The Terms say only that a user who thinks a ban or restriction was wrong "may submit an appeal through the functionalities provided on the Platform and we will review our decision."
TikTok's Community Guidelines enforcement page (effective September 24, 2026) fills in more. Every post first goes through automated review. A possible violation is "automatically removed, or flagged for additional review by our moderators," and more review happens "if content gains popularity or has been reported." Users can appeal removals, bans and decisions to make a post "ineligible for the FYF," the For You feed; TikTok says such restrictions "will appear in the TikTok analytics tool," and appeal status shows in the in-app Safety Center.
What is missing: no published deadline for deciding an appeal, no promise that a person rather than software reviews it, and no outside body like Meta's Oversight Board.
Creators say it often fails them. Nate Friedman, an independent digital journalist, told the New York Post in September that TikTok pulled one of his documentaries after it reached 1.5 million views: "They rejected my appeal and just cited 'community guidelines.'" In January, journalist Taylor Lorenz told Digiday the appeal system is "useless," and news creator V Spehar said "there's no person to contact there that's reviewing it." TikTok's Creator Academy, as quoted by Digiday, says its strike system provides "clear and consistent moderation." The Digital Free Press could not verify these individual cases.
Privacy and Data: The AI-Training License
By posting, you give TikTok USDS Joint Venture a license to your content that is "non-exclusive, irrevocable, and royalty-free," "assignable and sub-licensable, including through multiple tiers," and worldwide. It covers copying, editing and displaying your content for "operating, improving, and providing the Platform and developing new technologies (including training, testing, and improving our machine learning models and algorithms)," for the venture "and our service providers and business partners."
In plain English: you still own your video, TikTok does not pay you for it, and TikTok can use it to train its AI and recommendation systems and pass that permission to partners. "Irrevocable" means you cannot take it back. Deleting a video stops TikTok from publicly displaying it, the Terms say, but they do not say whether deletion ends other uses, such as training.
The Privacy Policy adds that TikTok uses what it collects to "train, test, and improve technology, such as machine learning models and algorithms," including by "scanning, analyzing, and reviewing user content, messages, AI interactions, and associated metadata."
The same policy says TikTok may collect "approximate or precise location information" if location services are on, receives advertiser data about "the pages you visit, products or services you purchase, and apps you download," and, subject to Executive Order 14352, "may transmit your information outside of the United States."
The training language in the Terms is new: the archived pre-deal Terms gave an "irrevocable" and "perpetual" license but did not mention machine learning. X's Terms are just as broad, covering "training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models."
Is there an opt-out? The Terms say the license is "subject to your Platform settings," but they do not name any setting that keeps your videos out of AI training, and The Digital Free Press did not find one in TikTok's published Terms or Privacy Policy. We asked TikTok directly.
Ownership and the Algorithm: ByteDance's 19.9 Percent
On paper, Americans are in charge. The venture's January 23 announcement says it will "retrain, test, and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data" in Oracle's U.S. cloud, review source code with Oracle, and hold "decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and content moderation."
But the algorithm itself is licensed from ByteDance, according to NPR's report on the deal, and the 2024 divestment law bars "any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm" between ByteDance and a new owner. The same announcement also says "TikTok global's U.S. entities," not the venture, "will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote to Presser on May 29, 2026, that the license "constitutes the exact type of ongoing relationship between the two entities that Congress sought to prohibit," citing an estimate that TikTok's algorithms run about two billion lines of code. The Digital Free Press did not find the license agreement published anywhere, or a public reply to the letter.
The administration disagrees. A July 16, 2026, Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion concluded the venture's TikTok is no longer banned from federal devices because it "functions independently of ByteDance," and found ByteDance's minority stake "makes no practical difference." The opinion relies partly on a letter from the venture's general counsel.
For users, little looks different; as analyst Matt Navarra told the BBC, "the goal is continuity not reinvention." The open question is who can see inside the feed. Right now, not the public.
What TikTok Gets Right
The app is still the most polished short-video product available, and this year added a Local Feed, an Election Center drawing on sources including Ballotpedia and the Associated Press, "made with AI" labels and Footnotes, its version of community notes. TikTok keeps U.S. data on American servers with outside security audits, bans paid political ads, and now publishes quarterly reports; for April through June it reported removing 14.6 million fake accounts and disrupting four covert influence networks. It also tells creators in their analytics when a post is kept out of the For You feed.
My Experience: A New Outlet on TikTok
TikTok says hundreds of U.S. news outlets post there, and it offers article links back to the original reporting. The audience is real: the New York Post, citing survey figures, reported that 43 percent of adults under 30 regularly get news on TikTok.
The Digital Free Press opened @tdfreepress as a brand-new account in mid-October, so these are early numbers from a fresh start. Since then we have posted our daily newscast, nightly shorts and voter guides. According to our own posting notes, every upload showed "Content under review" for about a minute before going public, and none had been removed as of October 27, according to those notes (not rechecked in TikTok Studio). The public profile, read the morning of October 28, showed 117 videos, 2 followers and 0 likes. An October 15 check of our TikTok Studio, also from our notes, found nearly every video at zero views.
That is the honest picture for a new outlet: posting is easy, reach is not. The For You feed decides who sees a video, and any video can come down "for any reason," with no clock on the appeal.
What TikTok Told TDFP
The Digital Free Press emailed six questions to TikTok's U.S. press office on October 28, 2026, asking for on-the-record answers. They covered:
1. Why the "for any reason" language was kept, and whether it will be narrowed.
2. Whether appeals have a deadline.
3. Whether the content license allows AI training on users' videos, and whether users can opt out.
4. How much influence ByteDance keeps over the algorithm, and who audits it.
5. How the company responds to creators across the political spectrum who say they were suppressed.
6. What else it wants readers to know.
On November 1, The Digital Free Press followed up with a deadline of Tuesday, November 3, at 5 p.m. ET.
TikTok did not respond by the deadline.
Recommendations for Improvement
To put the deal's promises into its contract and earn users' trust, TikTok should:
1. Narrow the Removal Clause: Drop "for any reason" and list the actual grounds for removal.
2. Guarantee Notice and Appeals: Promise notice in the Terms, and give every appeal a deadline and a human reviewer.
3. Publish the Algorithm License: Publish the key terms of the ByteDance algorithm license and how independence is checked.
4. Open the Feed to Researchers: Open the recommendation system to independent researchers.
5. Answer the AI-Training Question: Say plainly whether users can keep their videos out of AI training, and offer an opt-out if not.
6. Answer on the Record: TikTok did not respond to TDFP's six questions by the deadline. It should answer them on the record.
The Report Card
Free Speech and Moderation Policy: C
Removal "for any reason," no notice promise in the Terms, appeals with no clock, and repeated complaints from creators on both the left and the right.
Transparency: B-
Quarterly reports and feed-restriction notices are progress, but researchers lack access and the ByteDance license is not public.
Privacy and Data: C+
U.S. storage with outside audits, but precise location, off-app ad data, an irrevocable AI-training license with no named opt-out, and possible transfers abroad.
Ownership and Independence: C+
Majority American, but ByteDance keeps 19.9 percent and licenses the algorithm, and a UAE-based fund is a managing investor.
Features and Ease of Use: A
Fast, polished and familiar, with useful new tools.
Reach for News Creators: B-
A huge young audience and article links, offset by unpredictable enforcement and a slow start for new outlets.
Overall: C+ (6.5/10)
RATING
TikTok under its new owners is the same strong app with a new home for its data, and its enforcement reports are real progress. But the contract still lets TikTok remove anything "for any reason," appeals have no clock, users grant an irrevocable license that now spells out AI training, and ByteDance remains a part-owner and the algorithm's licensor. Complaints of unfair moderation have come from both sides, and TikTok has not opened its systems enough to settle them. That adds up to a C+, or 6.5 out of 10. The grade reflects TikTok's documented policies, product and public record, not politics, and it can rise if the venture puts its promises into its Terms.
Yossi Schmidt, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Digital Free Press
For any questions or information, you can email me. If you have a platform you'd like us to review, please reach out.
Sources: TikTok U.S. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy (last updated July 15, 2026), TikTok Community Guidelines (enforcement page), and archived earlier versions of the Terms and Privacy Policy (Internet Archive); TikTok USDS Joint Venture announcement, About, outage statements, Local Feed, midterm elections and second-quarter report pages; X Terms of Service; YouTube Terms of Service; Meta (Facebook) Terms of Service; U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel; Sen. Edward Markey; NPR; ABC News; BBC; The Guardian; Digiday; New York Post; America First Policy Institute (Joel Thayer); the whatever podcast on X; TDFP's public TikTok profile (@tdfreepress) and TDFP's own posting notes. Graphics: The Digital Free Press; TikTok icon from Ionicons (MIT License), via Wikimedia Commons.
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