Saw this on Facebook last week. Haven’t been able to shake it.
The post was paraphrasing something most people had already half-forgotten. For about ten days in January 2025, the United States held a referendum nobody scheduled. About a hundred and seventy million Americans use TikTok. When the law banning it kicked in, three or four million of them didn’t switch to Instagram or YouTube. They downloaded a Chinese app called Xiaohongshu, started talking to actual Chinese people, and got a fast education in how the math works in a country with a quarter of our per capita GDP.
One year later, almost to the day, the richest man on earth bought the platform.
This is a story about that ten-day window, what closed it, and who owns the keys now.
The Ten Days
The full timeline rounds out neatly. Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act on April 24, 2024. President Biden signed it the same day, attached to a foreign aid bill [1]. The Supreme Court upheld it 9-0 on January 17, 2025 [2]. TikTok went dark in the United States the following night around 10:30 PM Eastern, with a blackout screen that read in part:
“A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office.” [3]
It was back roughly fourteen hours later. On January 20, 2025, Trump signed the first of five executive orders extending the divestiture deadline. The non-enforcement window ran for a full year [4].
Inside that brief shutdown, something unusual happened. American TikTok users didn’t go to American alternatives. They went to a different Chinese app, Xiaohongshu, branded internationally as RedNote. Sensor Tower clocked U.S. downloads up twenty-fold week over week [5]. Reuters and Sensor Tower together counted seven hundred thousand new American users in forty-eight hours [6]. Similarweb tracked U.S. daily active users on RedNote going from about three hundred thousand the prior week to over thirty million on the day the ban hit [7]. The hashtag #TikTokrefugee had twenty-four million posts within days.
After Trump’s executive order, RedNote daily users dropped fifty-four percent in a week [8]. The exodus was a protest, not a permanent move. The window was small. About ten days. What got through it changed the conversation.
What They Actually Saw
Americans showed up on RedNote expecting a Chinese app. What they found was Chinese people, asking them questions.
The questions were about money. A user named kyleostromecky did a viral side-by-side and reported that seven dollars worth of corn at his American grocery store cost about ninety-seven cents in his Chinese correspondent’s grocery store [9]. Another user, danabanafofana, summed it up:
“Chinese grocery hauls are insane because they can actually afford food.”
Then came the receipts.
| Item | China | United States |
|---|---|---|
| 1 dozen eggs | $1.57 | $4.41 |
| 1 lb chicken fillets | $2.30 | $4.55 |
| 1 lb beef | $5.50 | $12.09 |
| 1 lb rice | $0.50 | $1.81 |
| Loaf of bread | $1.20 | $3.55 |
| Inexpensive restaurant meal | $3.00 | $20.00 |
| Ambulance ride (Shanghai vs. U.S. avg) | ~$50 | $1,200–$3,000+ |
| Vaginal birth, public hospital, out of pocket | $14–$490 | $3,000–$13,000+ |
That table is a snapshot. The full picture is uglier. China’s home ownership rate is around ninety percent. America’s hit sixty-five point three percent in the first quarter of 2026, the lowest since 2019 [13]. Sixty-two percent of Americans now say buying a home is unrealistic for them [14].
Healthcare came next. A Chinese RedNote user posted that an ambulance ride in Shanghai, the most expensive city in China, runs about fifty dollars [11]. Americans replied with itemized hospital bills. The infamous “skin-to-skin contact after birth” charge made another tour. A Guangdong user posted that her sister’s vaginal delivery in a public hospital cost about fourteen dollars out of pocket [10]. Basic public health insurance in China runs about four hundred yuan a year. That’s roughly sixty bucks.
A TikTok refugee named Sara C. went viral in tears, recounting that she’d dropped out of college to care for her disabled mother because America has no safety net for it [9]. She said:
“My suffering was at the expense of someone else becoming wealthy because they could.”
A Guangdong user posted what became one of the most-shared comments of the whole episode [15]:
“I suspect that all the people on Xiaohongshu are fake Americans. The information I have received since I was a child is that the United States has high welfare, high wages, freedom, and ease, one person works to support the whole family, and most of the holidays are spent traveling.”
And then, the line that hit hardest, paraphrased and reposted hundreds of times [9]:
"Someone in the comments asked me if we really had to pay for an ambulance in America, or if that was just their government's propaganda. Someone else asked if it's true that minimum wage hasn't been increased in sixteen years, or if that was just their government's propaganda."
The U.S. federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009 [16]. At the time of writing it’s been almost seventeen years. The American who answered the question had to confirm both. Yes, ambulances cost thousands of dollars. Yes, the wage is real. No, neither is propaganda. Or, if it is, it’s our own.
The Frame That Stopped Working in 1955
The Cold War sold a clean story. Free markets, limited government, individualism, and the rule of law on one side. Gulags, queues, and gray apartment blocks on the other. The U.S. Information Agency. Voice of America. Smuggled copies of Amerika magazine. CIA-financed cultural foundations. Comic books like This Godless Communism in 1961. Films like Red Nightmare in 1962. The frame went into every elementary school and most movie theaters for forty years.
It worked because in 1955 it was mostly true. The average American genuinely lived better than the average Soviet or Chinese citizen by almost any metric you could measure.
It hasn’t been updated. Cambridge historian Hannah Higgin [17]:
“America’s battle against Communism touched everyday life through overt and covert means. American culture was filled with subtle and not so subtle messages about how high the ideological stakes were.”
Those messages stuck. The infrastructure underneath them moved.
What Americans saw on RedNote in January 2025 wasn’t the discovery that China is a utopia. China is not a utopia. RedNote itself censors political content. Rural poverty there is real. The Uyghur situation is real. Dissent is suppressed.
The thing they saw is that the United States, four times richer per capita, delivers a worse working-class standard of living than the country we still describe with 1955 vocabulary. That’s the part the simple frame can’t survive.
One Year Later, Almost to the Day
The deal that emerged from the year-long enforcement pause closed on January 22, 2026. The new entity is called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. The ownership structure looks like this [18]:
ByteDance kept exactly under the 20% legal cap. Oracle re-creates and operates the U.S. algorithm. The new entity also owns Lemon8 and CapCut.
Vice President J.D. Vance, announcing the deal [19]:
“This deal will allow for the U.S. to control the app’s algorithm. It’s actually going to be American-operated all the way.”
By which Americans?
Larry Ellison, on September 10, 2025, briefly became the richest person on earth. Oracle’s stock jumped forty percent in a day on AI revenue projections, and his net worth peaked near three hundred and ninety-five billion dollars [20]. He’s currently sitting around two hundred billion. He owns forty percent of Oracle. He owns ninety-eight percent of the Hawaiian island of Lana’i.
He also owns the algorithm of the country’s most-used short-video platform.
Oracle’s first customer, in 1977, was the CIA. The agency had a database project codenamed Project Oracle. Ellison and his cofounder took over the contract. The company eventually adopted the name [21]. Oracle’s Information Assurance Center was founded two months after September 11, 2001, and headed by David Carney, formerly the third-ranking officer at the CIA. Carney told an interviewer:
“How do you say this without sounding callous? In some ways, 9/11 made business a bit easier. Now they clamor for it.” [21]
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta has served on Oracle’s board. Oracle helped the Heritage Foundation build personnel databases for Project 2025.
In September 2024, at Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting, Ellison described his vision of an AI-supervised future [22]:
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person.”
This is the man whose company now operates the algorithm that shapes the news feed of about a hundred and seventy million Americans.
His son, David Ellison, simultaneously closed the Skydance Media merger with Paramount Global on August 7, 2025. The Ellison family trust funded it [23]. The combined company controls CBS, CBS News, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, Showtime, Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, Comedy Central, and Pluto TV. Bari Weiss runs CBS News now. Her outlet The Free Press was acquired by Paramount Skydance. Paramount paid Trump sixteen million dollars to settle his lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The combined company is currently bidding against Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which would add CNN, HBO, and Warner studios to the same family’s holdings.
Within forty-eight hours of the TikTok deal closing, multiple top creators reported their reach plummeted on posts about ICE raids, Trump criticism, and Palestine [24]. The word “Epstein” was reportedly blocked in some users’ direct messages. Award-winning Gaza-based journalist Bisan Owda, an Emmy winner with about 1.4 million followers, had her account permanently banned. TikTok blamed most of the disruption on a “weather-related power outage” at the Oracle data center [25].
NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics ran the numbers on public posts and found no evidence of large-scale suppression in the trends. They also said, explicitly, that they could not rule out targeted shadow-banning, suppression of anti-Trump posts on those topics offset by pro-Trump posts, or anything happening in private DMs [26]. Their conclusion: TikTok should “provide a way for third-party researchers to study their recommender systems.”
Translation: we don’t have a leaked moderation memo. We have a pattern.
Not Left vs. Right
The TikTok ban passed the House 360 to 58. It passed the Senate 79 to 18. Biden signed it. Schumer and McConnell defended it. Trump and Vance finalized the deal that gave it to Ellison [1].
The constant across both administrations isn’t ideology. It’s the oligarch class winning.
The window in January 2025 closed because too many people were starting to ask the wrong question. The question wasn’t whether China is good or bad. The question was: why does my country, four times richer per capita, deliver a worse working-class standard of living than a country we still describe with 1955 vocabulary?
That question has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat. It has everything to do with who the American economy is run for, who the American media is owned by, and whose data infrastructure shapes what gets recommended next.
The TikTok deal doesn’t answer that question. It buys back the platform on which it was getting asked.
$7.25
Federal minimum wage. Unchanged since July 24, 2009.
That’s the data point that cracked open RedNote. A Chinese user, raised on her own government’s propaganda about American abundance, asked her American counterpart to confirm whether something so obviously absurd could be real. It is. It’s been real for almost seventeen years.
She assumed she was being lied to. She assumed correctly. The lie just wasn’t coming from the place she expected.
For ten days in January 2025, a few million Americans saw the same thing through the same window and went, wait, what? And then the richest man on earth, briefly, bought the window. His son owns the rest of the view.
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