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Jan. 26, 2026 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
22:40
Forced TikTok Sale—and Rising Censorship—Is for Israel, Not China

Glenn breaks down the forced sale of TikTok and why it poses a threat to free speech in the US, especially for Israel's critics.  ---------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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TikTok Ban's True Motivations 00:07:54
The forced sale of TikTok was consummated this week.
It was sold to a consortium led by, among others, Larry Ellison, who is the richest or second richest person on the planet, as well as, not coincidentally, the largest ever private donor to friends of the IDF.
He's the person who just brought Paramount and CBS through his son, David Ellison, and then installed Barry Weiss, another Israel loyalist as head of the newsroom at CBS News is also trying to buy Warner Brothers and Discovery and CNN, which is all part of the same property, all as support for Israel is unraveling.
And this forced sale of TikTok, which was originally known as the TikTok ban, it said either TikTok has to be sold to parties the government approves of, the U.S. government approves of, or it will be banned, is the subject of immense disinformation.
There's a lot of discussion of it this week in the media as a result of the consummation of this sale to this consortium led by Larry Ellison and Oracle.
And it's amazing to listen to these accounts, to read these accounts that are completely false about exactly what happened that led up to the TikTok ban or the forced sale and why exactly it happened.
It didn't happen because of concerns over China.
It happened.
And this doesn't take a conspiracy theory.
Every person involved in it will tell you it explicitly and has said it publicly.
It happened because there was a perception that the reason American young Americans were turning against Israel was because there was too much anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian content allowed on TikTok.
And it needed to be put into the hands of Israel supporters and Israel loyalists in order to take away this important instrument that Americans had been using to speak with one another freely about sensitive topics, including Israel.
And the censorship has already started because that was the whole point of all of this.
And I don't want you to take my word for it.
I want to show you the evidence so that there's no doubt about it.
So let's remember that the idea for a TikTok ban first began in 2020.
There you see the headline, Trump says he will ban TikTok.
And the date there is August 1st, 2020.
And the argument at the time was that because of the ownership by the Chinese and the control by the CCP, they could use it to propagandize our youth, to spy on Americans.
And it had to be taken out of the hands of the Chinese.
That was in 2020.
The TikTok ban didn't even come close to getting the votes necessary to enact on Capitol Hill through 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.
It simply lingered.
Nobody was ever talking about it.
There was no momentum to pass it.
When it was about China, there was just no way to get it enacted.
People weren't sufficiently scared.
It was only after October 7th, when the ADL came out and started demanding that TikTok either be banned or forced to sale into the hands of pro-Israel loyalists that the Democratic Party joined with the Republicans and that the Biden White House came out and supported the ban.
And they have said specifically it was due to concerns about criticism of Israel that were circulating on the platform.
And here's the reminder.
This is from CNN.
Joe Biden just signed a potential TikTok ban into law.
Here's what happens next.
And the date was April 20th, 2024.
So just six months after the October 7th attack.
All those years that it was about China, it didn't go anywhere.
By this point, by the way, Trump had reversed his position and said he opposed the TikTok ban and the TikTok for sale.
It could be because he had a billionaire donor, Jeffrey Yass, who had a big stake in TikTok and talked to Trump about it.
But for whatever reason, Trump withdrew his support for the TikTok ban in 2024.
But it was Joe Biden, the Democrats, who joined with the Republicans and got it passed through Congress and signed into law.
Now, again, I don't want you to take my word for the fact that this was all about Israel.
I want you to just look at the readily available evidence because all of the media accounts this week that describe the consummation of the sale keep saying that the TikTok talk ban happened out of concerns for Chinese influence over the app.
And that was not the motivating cause for any of this.
It was not the reason that it passed.
And the real reason it passed, which is a desire to protect Israel through censorship of information that primarily young Americans can obtain and share with one another, that is the reason.
And that's why this kind of censorship is already extremely visible on TikTok.
Here is real reporting, actual reporting in real time before the TikTok ban was signed by Joe Biden about why it was regaining momentum after all those years of lingering.
Here's NBC News.
Critics renew call for a TikTok ban claiming the platform has an anti-Israel bias.
The perceived performance of pro-Palestinian content on the platform depends on how you parse TikTok data.
And this is TikTok data.
And this is from November 1st, 2023.
So that's just NBC News saying, oh, look, the TikTok ban is being rejuvenated, not out of concern for China, but because of concerns to protect Israel.
Here is additional reporting from the New York Times.
Lawmakers renew calls to ban TikTok after accusations of anti-Israel content.
The criticism has put the popular video app on its heels at a precarious time.
That's what all the reporting said.
Here is the account in the Wall Street Journal about how this ban on TikTok or the forced sale of it regained momentum after lingering and being totally stagnant in Washington for all those years.
It says this: quote, it was slow going, namely the TikTok ban.
There, you see the headline, how TikTok was blindsided by the U.S. bill that could ban it.
It was all slow going until October 7th.
Nothing was happening with the TikTok ban until October 7th, which had nothing to do with China.
The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok.
People who historically hadn't taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw is an increase in anti-Semitic content posted to the app.
Anthony Goldblum, a San Francisco database scientist and tech executive, started analyzing data TikTok published in its dashboard for ad buyers showing the number of times users watch videos with certain hashtags.
He found far more views for videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags than those with pro-Israel hashtags.
With the ratio, while the ratio fluctuated, he found that at times it ran 69 to one in favor of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags.
You know why that was?
Because young Americans were getting a look for the first time at the real face of Israel and the U.S. support in financing and arming of Israel, and they hated what they saw.
They were watching videos of children and babies being blown up remorselessly and relentlessly, of hospitals and mosques and schools and UN shelters exploding.
And Americans across the political spectrum, we've shown you this polling data many times, turned against Israel.
That was the reason why there was so much anti-Israel sentiment on TikTok, not because the platform was biased, but because those were the sentiments, the freely expressed sentiments of young Americans who were following this.
Here's the account in The Economist.
The proposal for the TikTok ban gained momentum, partly as a result of disquiet over the app's handling of misinformation and anti-semitic content following Hamas's attack on Israel in October.
Netanyahu's Social Media Battle 00:13:36
I mean, just over and over, that's what all the reporting at the time reveals.
Now, the person who I think has been most candid about all of this is named Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, who has talked about how the TikTok ban is the most important battle success for Israel in what he considers the war of information that Israel is now waging over the internet to regain control of the internet, as he and Jonathan Rebaud of the EDL describe it.
And I want to just let you listen to them in their own words.
Here was Benjamin Netanyahu speaking today, and he says something he said many times, which is that the battle to control social media is one of Israel's most important war battles, if not its most important.
It's most prevalent in the social media.
This is the new battlefield, and this is where we must counter with our own weapons.
We're late in the game, but we will win this battle too, as we won on the battlefield, because we are developing the means to fight this.
Not with cavalry against F-35s, with F-40s against F-35s.
This is the next thing.
I mean, they're just saying right out in the open, they consider this a more important battlefield than what they fought in Lebanon or Gaza or Syria or all the other places they bombed, the West Bank.
And he's talking about how much resources they're pouring into making sure that they control the flow of information on social media.
This is all done in conjunction with his very good friend, Larry Ellison, who had previously offered Netanyahu a job with Oracle.
And as I said, is the largest private donor to the friends of the IDF.
This is all done as part of a very specific, explicit campaign.
Here is Benjamin Netanyahu meeting with American social media influencers.
Israel has become obsessed with American social media influencers.
And he asked them, what has been the greatest success in the Israeli battle for control of social media?
And most of them didn't know, but he told them.
And I want you to hear what he said.
Christian influencers, okay?
You said we talked about the woke right.
And he said, I call it the woke Reich.
That's a brilliant, because these people, you know, they're not any different from the woke left.
I mean, they're insane.
They're the reason.
But they're actually meeting on some of the things.
And what we have to do is we have to secure that part of the base of our support in the United States that is being challenged systematically.
A lot of this is done with money.
Money of NGOs, vast money of governments, vaster.
Okay?
We have to fight back.
How do we fight back?
Our influencers.
I think you should also talk to them if you have a chance, to that community.
They're very important.
And secondly, we're going to have to use the tools of battle.
You know, the weapons change over time.
You can't fight today with swords.
That doesn't work very well.
Okay.
And you can't fight with cavalry.
That doesn't work very well.
And you have these new things, you know, like drones, things like that.
I won't get into that.
But we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we're engaged.
And the most important ones are social media.
And the most important.
Not one of the most important ones in Israel's wars.
The most important war that Israel is fighting, he says, is the one for social media.
Important purchase that is going on right now is class followers.
TikTok.
TikTok.
Number one.
Number one.
And I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.
And the other one, what's the other one that's most important?
X. X. Very good.
All right.
Do you have any questions about that?
He says the most important battle in Israel's war to control social media is the forced sale of TikTok to Larry Ellison.
He doesn't name Larry Ellison, but that was the deal the whole time.
You think it's a coincidence that Benjamin Netanyahu and the ADL are saying that the most important thing to us is to get TikTok out of the hands of anyone who will allow free speech and put it into the hands of pro-Israel loyalists so they censor it and allow us to regain control of public opinion in the United States.
And then that's exactly what the Congress did.
I mean, I just showed you the reporting from multiple different sources, all saying that the only reason the TikTok ban rejuvenated in Washington was because of the concern that it was allowing too much Israel, anti-Israel content on the platform and of the need to censor that.
Here's Anthony Blanken, longtime, lifelong Israel supporter, the Secretary of State under Joe Biden, talking to Mitt Romney at the McKean Institute.
But they just come out and say, yeah, we need to control social media for Israel.
And the TikTok ban is the most important thing that there is in this regard.
Every millisecond.
And of course, the way this is played out on social media has dominated the narrative.
And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost.
And the emotion, the impact of images dominates.
And we can't discount that.
But I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.
A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature.
If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.
So I'd note that's of real interest.
And the president will get the chance to make action in that regard.
I mean, they're just saying it.
And that's why it's so frustrating and so significant, even though I guess it's not that surprising that major media outlets are all talking about the TikTok sale and pretending this is about China.
Mitch Romney said, you want to know why there's so much support, bipartisan support in Congress for a ban on TikTok?
It's because of concern that there's too much criticism of Israel allowed on the platform.
There are too many anti-Israel posts circulating, too many videos of Israel blowing up kids and hospitals and incinerating families and too much discussion of how they lied about it.
That's Mitt Romney saying that's why we had to ban TikTok or get it into the hands of somebody who wouldn't allow this any longer.
That's why I say it doesn't matter how much of a conspiracy theory you think it is.
You don't need to speculate.
I don't need to analyze anything.
I just am letting you hear in their own word, in their own words, exactly what it is that they were saying.
Now, speaking of people who were very honest and upfront about the fact that this was done for Israel, here's Jonathan Greenblatt speaking in Israel, reporting to his bosses, basically, about what needs to be done.
And listen very closely to the words that Jonathan Greenblatt used when talking about the TikTok ban.
Meaningful than holding on to Mount Hermon.
Libelist tweets certainly might seem less deadly than missiles from Yemen.
But this is urgent because the next war will be decided based on how Israel and its allies perform online as much as offline.
This is what they've been saying, that they need to regain control of social media for at least since October 7th, when public opinion for the first time really started unraveling.
On the right and the left, the center and everything in between, they got desperate and they resorted to overt censorship.
Now, even before the sale was consummated, this censorship for Israel was already happening in anticipation of who are going to be the new owners of TikTok.
And TikTok tried to accommodate the U.S. government with its content moderation.
They hired away former CIA operatives and all sorts of U.S. security state operatives that Google and Facebook had hired to monitor and censor the political discussion there to align with U.S. policy.
TikTok was spending huge amounts of money to hire them away to show the U.S. government, don't worry, we'll censor the way you want.
And the ADL obviously made TikTok a major priority.
As you just heard Netanyahu and Jonathan Rebout talk about.
And one of the things they ordered, TikTok demanded that TikTok do, and of course, TikTok did it, was this.
There you see that woman, the picture of her, her name is Erica Mandel.
She's an American citizen who never fought in the U.S. military, but she did go to Israel and joined the IDF.
And now she's the chief censor for all matters, Israel, and anti-Semitism in the U.S. Here's the Jerusalem Post headline.
TikTok's new hate speech manager is the former IDF soldier and proud Zionist.
Erica Mendel's new position involves developing and driving the company's public policy positions on hate speech, according to the job description.
Now, what do you think is going to happen if you put an American citizen so obsessed with Israel that she actually went and joined a foreign army and talks about how her Zionism is central to her identity?
And she was the one that the ADL insisted be placed there.
And now she's the head censor for all matters concerning hate speech, Israel, and anti-Semitism.
That's why there are so many reports of TikTok aggressively censoring in defense of Israel, because that was the whole point of this legislation, is the people who voted for it, sponsored it, advocated for it, signed it, all explicitly said.
And if you don't think this is embedded in TikTok, I want to show you the current CEO of TikTok.
His name is Adam Presser.
And he spoke with the World Jewish Congress last year.
Of course, he did, about the efforts of social media to regain control of the discourse surrounding Israel.
And he boasted of the steps TikTok was taking to censor Israel critics.
And if you think that's an exaggeration, I want you to listen in your own words to Adam Presser, who's now the CEO of TikTok, even above Erica Mindel, the IDF soldier that the ADL installed there.
And listen to what he boasts about.
Listen to how he understands free speech on TikTok.
Change to designate the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech.
So if somebody 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.
Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity.
We also have, I think, over two dozen Jewish organizations that are constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends.
There is no finish line.
There's no finish line to moderating hate speech, identifying hateful trends, trying to keep the platform safe.
There's no such thing as an endgame.
Right.
The censorship for Israel is going to go on forever.
Credit, by the way, to Chris Menahan, who is an outstanding person to follow.
He's at Info.
He's at Infolib News.
That's his Twitter name, and I highly recommend him, but he's responsible for that, gathering that video and edit.
And he monitors these kinds of events constantly and posts what you ought to know about them.
But that's the CEO of TikTok saying: if you want to talk about how proud of a Zionist you are, how much you love Zionism, how wonderful Zionism is, you're free to do that on TikTok.
What you cannot do is speak of Zionism disparagingly.
You can't use it as an insult.
You can say, I think communists are responsible for a lot of bloodshed, but you cannot say, I think you as a Zionist are responsible for a lot of bloodshed.
The number one threat to free speech in the West and in the United States are Israel loyalists trying to monitor and police the discourse of Americans to forcibly expel from the discourse criticism of this foreign country.
And the fact that they just got a hold of, in the words of Benjamin Netanyahu, controlled what had been by far the most popular social media app for young people in America, but also tens of millions of American adults as well, and put Adam Presser at the top, along with an IDF soldier, like they put Barry Weiss at CBS.
Controlled TikTok: Israel's Battle Victory 00:01:01
How do you, anyone doesn't see this?
It's impossible.
The only way not to see it is to want not to see it.
This is the greatest threat to free speech in the United States.
And the fact that they so openly commandeered TikTok, forced its sale into the hands of Larry Ellison, what Benjamin Netanyahu rightly said was the greatest battlefield victory for Israel and what is their most important battle in this war after the ADL demanded it.
We showed you the video in a report, a video report we did early this week about the ADL being the most aggressive and effective censorship organization in the United States, how Jonathan Grieba went on Morning Joe and decreed it's time to ban TikTok, not because he was concerned about China that he didn't even pretend, but because it was allowing too much criticism of Israel.
It's taking place all over the world.
Hate speech codes to protect Israel, to punish Israel critics, and in the United States, the commandeering of social media.
And I don't want you to take my word for it.
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