Throngs of TikTok users say the social media platform suppressed or delayed videos about the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis man by federal immigration agents, charging that posts tied to the incident drew few views or were stalled amid broader technical issues on the site.
Some said their posts about the deadly encounter stalled, while others complained their videos received a fraction of their normal viewership. Many accused the tech company of silencing them under a #TikTokCensorship hashtag on X — formerly known as Twitter — Bluesky and Facebook.
One TikTok user with the username @necie28 accused the platform of “full-on censorship” after videos she uploaded that were critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement logged zero views, despite her having 35,700 followers. Her post about the alleged censorship had 15 views on Monday morning, compared with 1.1 million views for her pinned post.
But the problems on TikTok appeared to extend beyond political content focusing on ICE’s Minneapolis encounter. Thousands of TikTok users reported outages Sunday on the viral video-sharing site, including trouble posting videos, not being able to see follower-count changes, and videos showing no views, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages based on user input.
The complaints about TikTok, which ramped up over the weekend, arrive days after the company announced it had finalized a deal to spin off its U.S. business to non-Chinese investors to avoid a ban in the country. TikTok has some 200 million U.S. users.
Tech companies such as TikTok, Meta and YouTube often face scrutiny over how platforms surface content during moments of heightened political division or make major changes to their algorithms. Content is sometimes throttled, blocked or removed for a wide variety of unanticipated reasons. Automated moderation systems can make mistakes as they filter violent or hateful content, and algorithms sometimes flag users who make sudden changes to the type of content they post. This latest incident illustrates how TikTok will likely face skepticism under new ownership from its large, younger user-base over how it treats dicey political content.
TikTok said on Thursdaythat it has finalized its deal to spin off its U.S. business to non-Chinese investors, just before the deadline of President Donald Trump’s suspension of a ban on the platform if it didn’t change ownership. The new U.S. company, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, is controlled by a consortium of U.S. businesses that include Trump allies such as Oracle, whose executive chairman, Larry Ellison, has assembled an array of media propertiesfriendly to Trump.
TikTok said in a post on X that it has “been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate.” The company added that it’s working with the data center “to stabilize our service.”
A White House spokesperson said in a statement that the “White House is not involved in, nor has it made requests related to, TikTok’s content moderation”
Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor, said in a Bluesky post Sunday that a video he uploaded to TikTok criticizing the Department of Homeland Security had been “under review” for nine hours and still couldn’t be shared. Vladeck said he argued in the video that DHS’s recent assertions that its officers had the authority to enter homes without judicial warrants in immigration cases were “bunk.”
“I know it’s hard to track all the threats to democracy out there right now, but this is at the top of the list,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said on X.
Other U.S.-based tech companies have faced similar complaints. Last year, after Meta announced it was ending its fact-checking program, among several other Republican-friendly content rules, abortion pill providers complained after Instagram suspended their accounts, some of which were later restored by the company, which said it was not related to the new policies.
In 2023, thousands of supporters of Palestinians complained that their posts were being suppressed by Meta’s social networks — an incident the company blamed on an internal bug. In the United States, Republicans have long accused TikTok of overemphasizing liberal-leaning content on the platform, especially videos about the Israel-Gaza war and Trump.
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