Throngs of TikTok users say the social media platform suppressed or delayed videos about the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis man by federal immigration personnel, alleging 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.
The critics included singer Billie Eilish, who posted “tiktok is silencing people btw” on her Instagram account, after her brother Finneas O’Connell posted a TikTok video about Alex Pretti’s death that reached fewer viewers than usual.
“You’ve spent 30 years straight telling us that children have to die so that we’re allowed to legally carry weapons everywhere in the United States,” O’Connell said in the video. “This guy was being beaten to a pulp on the ground. He didn’t draw his weapon.” As of Monday morning, the video had 42,000 views, compared with more than 10 times that number for many of his other videos.
Another 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.
David Leavitt, a freelance writer, said that two of the three videos he posted on TikTok the day after the change of ownership received an “ineligible for recommendation” label. One of them poked fun at President Donald Trump, while the other showed footage of anti-ICE protesters filling the streets of Minneapolis.
“The only way to view the videos is to have a direct link or visit my profile, then click them,” he said. “Neither followers or people on the For You page would see them from normal scrolling.”
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 probably face skepticism under new ownership from its large, younger user base over how it treats dicey political content.
TikTok said on Thursdaythat it had finalized its deal to spin off its U.S. business to non-Chinese investors, just before the deadline of 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. Oracle declined to comment.
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 have 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 of the alleged censorship.
Other U.S.-based tech companies have faced similar complaints. Last year, after Meta announced it was ending its fact-checking program and lifted restrictions on certain hot-button topics, 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.
Glenn Gerstell, former National Security Agency general counsel and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, said that it was not yet clear if there actually was a change in TikTok’s content moderation policies, “but if true, it would be disturbing if the fear of foreign content manipulation was replaced by concerns over domestic censorship.”
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