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 22, 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 billion to the Israeli military, may—when CODEPINK isn’t looking—even wink across the ocean to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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 US.

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 United Nations findings (December 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 US.

For Israel flag wavers, this was an emergency.

TikTokers in the United States favor Palestine vs. Israel posts 17-to-1, 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 No. 1 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.”

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. President Donald Trump, Ellison’s chum, then issued an executive order to delay the sale of TikTok’s US platform until Oracle and ByteDance could........

© Common Dreams