Is time ticking down for TikTok?

Published on LifeBonder’s site

There’s no big reveal here. If you’re a TikTok user, you know by now that it’s about more than just cats and viral dances. Every scroll is a vote for what you want to see. Micromoments that define the constellation of content at your fingertips. Every choice you make, whether you linger on a video or move on to the next, shapes your universe. With one video tagged several times on the backend, the algorithm is silently building a psychographical profile of who you are. Your attention is its greatest economy, and every second on the app is a microtransaction.  

What’s going on?

With over a billion users worldwide, what makes TikTok uniquely powerful is you. Its audience. The platform is dominated by teens and young adults with views and consumer habits that are more easily influenced. This means that whoever controls its algorithms controls the lever of influence over culture, politics, and emerging consumer behavior. In the US, it’s increasingly looking like control will handed over to the White House. 

The latest news on ByteDance’s US sale – where ByteDance will hold less than 20% of the stock in the new company – isn’t just about national security. If it was, after years of discussion, the app would have been banned outright by now. Instead, with Oracle, OpenAI, and a handful of major media and venture players all circling, the real tussle now is for control.

TikTok risks becoming less of a neutral entertainment platform and more of a battleground for narrative power. The shift may be subtle, but certainly significant.

Peeking behind the curtain

You may have heard Oracle’s name popping up more in the tech space of late due to its focus on automation and partnership with OpenAI. Or you may have heard of Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder, who is now worth $368 billion and enjoys the title of the second richest person in the world. Either way, Oracle has already positioned itself as the “trusted tech partner” for TikTok’s US data.

This means that, if successful, Oracle gains complete visibility into what people watch, how they behave, and how to shape that behaviour. In collaboration with OpenAI’s AI infrastructure, the app now has the capability to dramatically curate and even predict personalised content to optimise engagement so that users are more locked in and gamified than ever before. 

Zooming out for a second, X, Facebook, and YouTube all use algorithms that don’t just serve content. They determine what is visible, viral, and even define truth for their users. However, TikTok is discovery-first and built around ultra-short clips that maximise the reward loop: a few seconds of dopamine, an immediate decision to watch another video, another micro-signal captured and fed back into the model. 

This model lends itself well to conditioning. In fact, in a recent study, researchers created 24 accounts on TikTok and searched for Chinese-censored keywords. The results include much more pro-China content than anti-China content, and far more irrelevant information than what came up on other social media platforms. Despite the CCP disputing the results of this study, it’s easy to see how algorithms have the potential to boost or hide content in a way that can reward and influence the psychology and worldviews of the user.

As the study states: “These points collectively indicate a systematic manipulation of information, suggesting that propaganda produced by state actors and orchestrated through assets owned or influenced by them shapes user perceptions at a massive scale”. And the US future plans for the app aren’t exempt from the results of its own study. 

With the US acquisition and in combination with powerful media outlets – Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder’s son, David Ellison, recently acquired media company Paramount, which owns CBS News – you have yourself a well-oiled, state-controlled, homegrown narrative machine. Whether it’s political messaging, product placement, or priming the groundwork for new trends, the echoes from one side of a chamber may now be heard in another. 

Activism and self-advocacy

But even before the news of the White House’s TikTok deal, the algorithmic seeds had already been sown in the fertile soil of its users’ minds. So what does this mean for you? Since late 2024 and early 2025, TikTok’s active user base has decreased by 100 million, falling from 1.69 billion to 1.59 billion; a decline attributed to ongoing national security concerns and potential bans in the US. However, other factors include the desire to avoid “doom-scrolling,” to find apps with less pressure to follow trends, or to pursue more direct engagement with communities and creators. 

Whether you’re in the US or the EU, the best thing you can do is search for alternative social media. In the EU, LifeBonder is a strong choice for people looking to combine their need for online interaction with safe, human, offline connections. Even though the EU presents strong data protection laws, and while the algorithm isn’t affected by US news here in Europe, the best way to protect your data, mental well-being, and ensure you’re getting the best possible standard of information is to shift your attention away from TikTok. 

“Before deciding to delete [TikTok], I spent 1-2 hours a day scrolling through my feed… Despite being painfully aware that another cute dog video would not materially improve my life, I would keep mindlessly moving on to the next clip,” Hannah Getahun, journalist from the Business Insider commented. “…most importantly, my overall mental health improved: I don’t have that post-scroll regret that makes me feel crappy about spending hours of my life I will never get back”.

A quick search on Reddit confirms the mental health benefits of kicking the TikTok habit. “I kept getting stuck scrolling through TikTok for hours each day… I thought of my TikTok use as just watching funny videos for entertainment and didn’t really realize how much weird inflammatory content I was also taking in,” a Redditor comments.  “I live in a large city and after only a few weeks of being off TikTok I felt a really significant difference in how annoyed I felt at other people on a daily basis. It definitely also helped that I started being a lot more decisive about how I spend my leisure time… I keep up with the news but my outlook on society and other people in general has shifted to being 1000% more positive and optimistic”. 

Social media isn’t free. Every swipe costs something: your data, your focus, your mental health. TikTok’s algorithm isn’t just addictive; it’s designed to weaponise your attention and feed on your engagement, so the simplest act of resistance is also the most powerful. Step away, reclaim your time, and remember that protecting your mind is a silent form of advocacy.