TikTok
Who TF Am I Working For? | Part 2
Video Transcription: So this part of the story is dark, like really dark. It's honestly one of the hardest parts to talk about in this series because it's one of those stains on history that is so heavy that I can't even say the name of this event on this app without risk of getting this video taken down. That's how sensitive this event is, still 36 years later.
So that's why I put all of my research, the full story, every receipt, every document, over on my sub-stack, the Dre Dossier. So you should go subscribe there, link is in my bio. So let's get into it.
In 1989 something happened in Beijing that shook the world. For weeks leading up to June 3rd, students and workers had filled the streets demanding reform, freedom of speech, and for an end to corruption. The protests were peaceful, the atmosphere was electric, filled with hope.
But then on the night of June 3rd, the government rolled in their tanks and by dawn soldiers had opened fire on unarmed crowds. Hundreds, probably thousands were... The true number has never actually been confirmed and inside China, most people grow up never hearing about it. That's how tightly this has been erased from history.
After this, the government faced a bit of a legitimacy crisis. People didn't trust them, so they turned to two different tools. First, they launched the Patriotic Education Campaign, and this was where they flooded schools and media with China's 5,000 year old heritage in celebration.
Confucius, the Great Wall, and especially the Oracle Bones from the earliest of Chinese writing. Second, was a little less overt. They quietly began investing in surveillance infrastructure, computers, networks, and databases to help police tighten control.
And here's where I stumbled into something a bit strange, because that very same year, 1989, was when Oracle, the American database company that we talked about in part one with Larry Ellison as the CEO, made their first moves into China through a Taiwan-based agent. Instead of going with a simple and direct translation of its name, that agent had registered a trademark under the name Jack-A-Won, which literally means the collection of Oracle bone inscriptions. Pause on that for a second, okay? Because... In 1989 to 1990, the Chinese state was reviving Oracle Bones as a part of its lexicon and bringing it back into schools and media as a way to rebuild legitimacy.
But that filing for Oracle, it didn't happen until 1991, the one that had formally made China its subsidiary under the exact name of Oracle Bones. Even though it's 1989 that there's proof of Oracle going over to China to begin some of these dealings, so it felt more like an alignment, like a strategy of branding than a coincidence. Fast forward a decade into April 25th, 2001, and Beijing State Council had approved something called the Golden Shield project, and by July 11th, 2001, directives were issued for it to continue to build out.
Now, the Golden Shield wasn't just a single tool, it was the skeleton of a nationwide surveillance system build out. Police databases and household registrations and digitized internet activities centralized, like all of it in one single database. It was actually the early backbone of what eventually became the great firewall of China.
Hold on to that thought, okay? Because two months later, on September 11th, 2001, the U.S. is hit with terrorist attacks, right? And in the aftermath, while the country is grieving, Larry Ellison decides to step forward. This is when he offers Oracle software for free to build out this national ID system, one giant database where everybody's personal details could be compiled and instantly available for all of law enforcement. Different countries, different crises, same year, both turning to the same centralized database type of system for a solution to instability.
Now, fast forward into the 2010s, and the pattern starts to sharpen, because in 2011, Oracle had bought Ndeka, which was this platform that could pull in all of this messy data and organize it. It would take all these tweets, police records, call logs, and it would display them on this dashboard in this organized fashion. By 2012, during the NATO summit protests in Chicago, police had been using Ndeka to monitor demonstrators.
Protesters' tweets flowed into the same screen as 911 calls and arrest data, and they were able to predict who was going to commit crime based off of those things, and then additionally, like the weather and stuff, which is wild. It was marketed as situational awareness, but basically what it meant was that your social media record could now be treated like a part of your crime record. Not long after, we learned that Oracle had used Chicago as a case study in a pitch deck to sell surveillance to China.
All of their decks had been bragging about how Chicago had used Ndeka to predict crime within three days. Based off the weather? By 2018, provincial police departments in China, including in Liaoning, which was very disgusting the way it was used there, were listed as Oracle customers. Maybe you're starting to see a pattern here.
Now we move into 2019 when Oracle had suddenly laid off 1,600 engineers in Beijing and Shenzhen. Workers had protested outside the buildings holding up signs that were saying things like high profits, why layoffs? Because it didn't make sense at the time. Oracle was making billions.
It was doing great, it was scaling, and it kept getting more contracts. In hindsight though, it looks like they were scaling back right before the world's biggest health crisis to date. That's right folks, we've made it into the COVID-19 part of the story, probably one of the biggest linchpins of Oracle and China's relationship.
By January of 2020, COVID had spread from Wuhan to the US and almost immediately China had rolled out all of its health code apps. That's where citizens were assigned these QR codes on their phones that controlled where they could go. So if they had a green light, that meant they could move freely.
If they had a yellow light, that meant they had certain restrictions and red meant lockdown. It was all based off of their health data that they would have to submit daily. And here's why this matters because surveillance systems need a lot of information in order to work perfectly, right? They need data and they need to know more than just like what you like to shop for online and and where you're traveling for the holidays, right? They need to know who you are and the most powerful way to do that is through biological data because it's the most permanent.
The value that biological data has to surveillance systems cannot be understated. It fuels control on a level that is so intimate and permanent and nearly impossible to erase once it's collected and stored. And I'll bet you never guessed what happens next.
That's right. Larry Ellison makes his move at the same time. In March of 2020, he calls President Trump and offered Oracle's database to run America's pandemic response.
So within weeks, Oracle had built this national COVID registry tracking vaccines and treatments. Just like that, the software's ready. Then one thing leads to another and by 2022 Oracle buys Cerner, the healthcare data company, for 28 billion dollars, giving them access now to the electronic health records of millions of Americans.
It almost feels like the COVID-19 was like the case study that Oracle needed in order to prove that he could handle healthcare data at scale. And once that system was in place, it stopped feeling temporary. You see the pattern that keeps happening? It's like crisis, a crazy solution, but then it becomes normalized really quickly.
Yeah, that's going to be a thing throughout this whole series, so just get comfortable with that. And finally, we get to TikTok. In August of 2020, while Washington was threatening a ban unless ByteDance had sold the app, Beijing updated its export laws.
And by December 1st, TikTok's algorithm was officially restricted. And then on June 17th, 2022, Buzzfeed had leaked audio from some TikTok staff member admitting that everything is still seen in China. That means that engineers in Beijing still had access to U.S. data, is what that implied.
And Washington predictably freaked the fuck out. And then there's guess who? Larry Ellison and Oracle ready to save the day with Project Texas the same day. The same day.
Yeah, it was that same day that the leak happened, that TikTok had rolled out this idea about Project Texas handing over to Oracle all of its data controls for the U.S., and oversight of the code, and some minor access to the algorithm. I'm sorry, plans like that do not come together overnight, okay? That's why this timing makes it feel like it was just something that was waiting in the wings, waiting to be triggered. It's called reverse engineering a problem so that you can solve it.
That's what tech bros love to do, but especially Larry Ellison. And on January 18th, 2025, TikTok suddenly goes dark in the U.S. for 12 hours, and then reappears on January 19th, the exact day the divestor ban deadline was supposed to happen, and thanking the president of the United States for supporting TikTok and China or whatever. And by the summer of 2025, TikTok just kept layering on the changes, right? In July, they had hired Erika Mendel, who was a former Israeli army instructor and later a U.S. state's department conductor, to manage hate speech policy.
That's not a conflict of interest. And in August, new community guidelines were posted that went live two days ago, I believe it was, adding sweeping categories for misinformation, foreign influence, and national security. And almost immediately, creators started noticing more bans and removals.
So that's where we are. Oracle has embedded itself into China's story, into China's history at moments of crisis, and in the U.S. has reflected that same mentality. And each crisis brings the same rhythm.
It's pattern recognition, right? It's the crackdown, it's terror, it's the pandemic, it's the league, and Oracle is always there, the quiet backbone that once it gets into place is impossible to remove. And while this part focused mostly on China, it's not the only geopolitical piece to the puzzle here, because Israel, as you can see, is already appearing on the edges of this story through hires, partnerships, surveillance tech. Just wait until you hear about where this series is going next, because that's going to be in the next, the next post.
And Ellison has said, through his own words, his own creepy, creepy words, that AI and these databases should be used to keep people on their best behavior. He's got a total wet dream for surveillance technology. Just look it up.
Look up anything that he said publicly. You know, Ellison has been telling us this for decades through his actions, you know. He's been telling us about what kind of world he wants to build, which is why I think it's so important to look at China as the first piece of that puzzle.
The only question left now is whether or not we're willing to believe him.
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[Original Creator Credit:
The Drey Dossier | Substack
Investigating how technology quietly rewires power, politics, and public life.
]
Part 2:
[ video too long to upload directly]
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