Maybe not, but the danger is real. We need better ways to lift the social media veil

The chaos of the last year has often made it hard to know where to look, but the slow-moving glacier that is the Ellison family's takeover of Paramount/CBS, TikTok, and (maybe) Warner Discovery is worth some angst. It's a potential realignment of a huge portion of American media under a Trump-friendly billionaire -- something that will affect the flow of information going into U.S. heads and homes for decades.

The TikTok acquisition, by a consortium of investors led by the Ellisons, has been the least-covered part of the buying spree until this past week. In the days following the final sale of the platform on Jan. 22, some users shared screenshots suggesting TikTok was blocking DMs containing the word "Epstein"; creators said videos about Minneapolis and the killing of Alex Pretti were getting stuck under review, showing zero views, or reaching far fewer viewers than usual; and producer Finneas said his anti-ICE TikTok about Pretti’s death was drawing abnormally low views. (Billie Eilish reposted a screenshot on Instagram saying “TikTok is silencing people”; within a day the video rebounded into the hundreds of thousands of views.) In response, California governor Gavin Newsom announced a review of TikTok's content moderation policies, and there have been reports of users fleeing the platform for the service UpScrolled, which has hit #1 on the Apple’s App Store.

As the Verge explained, the cause was almost certainly an outage. There was a TikTok disruption after a data center was knocked out by recent arctic weather, affecting many people beyond progressive influencers. But the core issue behind the distrust — how little power the average citizen has within this privately held social media panopticon — remains very real. TikTok, Meta, and X  quite literally own an enormous chunk of modern discourse, and have a level of influence on that discourse that no one else shares. The tools average people have to call out abuses — anecdotal evidence like first-person accounts, screenshots, and inference — can be easy to dismiss.

With so much life and commerce happening on social media, we need more visibility into how these platforms make their decisions. One idea legal scholars have proposed is a "right to know" framework, which would impose disclosure requirements on platforms similar to the Freedom of Information Act. Other proposed legislation, like the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, would compel platforms to answer queries from vetted researchers. Another idea is forcing platforms to let people use "middleware" -- filters that sit one top of platforms and allow users more control over what they see. 

Social media companies are incredibly resilient once they reach scale. Elon Musk has degraded and politicized X for years, yet many people who would leave can’t, because their networks are there. (Cory Doctorow has a great breakdown of why "switching costs" can be so remarkably high in his 2025 book Enshittification.) Despite the Newsom review and reports of people leaving, the fundamentals of TikTok are unlikely to change. The new owners will be settled in by the midterm elections, when small tweaks to relevance estimators could subtly shift what content 170 million Americans receive. And unlike what happened at that other Ellison property, 60 Minutes, these changes won't happen in rooms full of journalists who love to leak. We need better ways to find out what's happening.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Hit me at [email protected].