How U.S. powerbrokers are manipulating tech and news to protect Israel

Public support for the Israeli regime in the United States has fallen to its lowest level in history. A Gallup poll in July showed that 60% of Americans reject the Israeli regime’s attacks in Gaza.

Findings by the Pew Research Center also showed that one-third of American adults (33%) say the U.S. provides too much military aid to the Israeli regime.

Most Americans hold negative views of the Israeli regime and report being deeply worried about its military assaults, the killing of Palestinian civilians, and the starvation in Gaza.

A New York Times/Siena poll found that more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with the Israeli regime.

According to Middle East Eye, the crisis of legitimacy facing the Israeli regime is particularly acute among young Americans; only 9% of those aged 18–34 support its military actions in the Gaza Strip.

Forty-two percent of individuals aged 18–29 say the U.S. gives too much military aid to the Israeli regime, while 21% believe the U.S. provides an appropriate or insufficient amount.

One after another, influential power players—from Hillary Clinton to wealthy tech investors and members of Congress—have blamed this shift on TikTok, as though young Americans are incapable of independently concluding that repeatedly torching tents full of displaced civilians is wrong.

Amid the decline in pro-Israel sentiment—which effectively mirrors declining support for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and beyond—America’s ruling class has intensified its control over major media institutions.

In September, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring that TikTok’s continued operation in the U.S. be contingent on majority ownership by one or more American entities.

Trump’s actions build on the Biden administration’s stance toward TikTok, which also sought U.S. control over the app—an approach supported by both parties in Congress.

As a result, a group of American investors led by the software giant Oracle has taken control of 65% of TikTok.

Oracle is set to oversee TikTok’s U.S. operations, provide cloud services for user-data storage, and obtain a license to manage the app’s algorithm.

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder, is a major donor to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), a U.S.-based NGO that effectively subsidizes the Israeli military.

He has stated: “I feel a deep emotional connection to Israel, and we will do whatever we can to support it.”

A similar pattern is unfolding in traditional news media. The Ellison family’s media company, Skydance—financially backed by Larry Ellison and run by his son David—recently purchased Paramount, the studio that owns CBS and a collection of cable networks.

While TikTok has significant space for pro-Palestinian messaging, traditional outlets like CBS have no history of supporting Palestinian freedom.

CBS, like all major corporate media in the U.S., routinely produces content aligned with the objectives of both the United States and the Israeli regime in West Asia.

For example, last year CBS News published 2,575 reports referencing Gaza, but only 388 included the word “genocide.”

Thus, CBS News already has a track record of genocide denial through omission—a form of media distortion that helps produce public consent for the genocide in Gaza by reducing the likelihood that enough Americans will fully realize their government is participating in a campaign of annihilation.

The U.S. government and the billionaires it serves know they cannot win the debate over Palestine and the Israeli regime. They see that their colonial project is rapidly losing legitimacy.

The effort to erase content that casts the Israeli regime and the U.S. in a negative light—while occasionally offering audiences a sanitized glimpse of American-Israeli brutality in Palestine—is a sign of desperation, not strength. And this tactic will not work.

Media do not operate in a vacuum, and people are not empty vessels that corporate news outlets can simply fill with whatever they wish.

The image of the Israeli regime is beyond repair—and so is that of America’s ruling class, especially among young people who will not soon forget how their peers were suspended, expelled, or brutalized by America’s ruthless machinery of repression.