TikTok said its app faced technical problems on Tuesday after users accused the service of suppressing posts related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
TikTok’s U.S. operations said in a statement on Monday that a power outage at an American data center had impeded users from uploading new videos. It said that some videos also inaccurately showed that they had zero views or likes.
Some TikTok users, including the comedian Megan Stalter, have accused the app of blocking them from posting videos about ICE or limiting the reach of those videos. State Senator Scott Wiener, Democrat of California, who is running for Congress, said on X that he had posted about legislation that would allow lawsuits against ICE agents. Mr. Wiener said the post was “sitting at zero views, and I’m not the only person this is happening to.”
It’s an early test for the app after its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, last week spun off its U.S. operations into a new joint venture controlled by non-Chinese investors. Those investors include firms close to President Trump, like the cloud computing giant Oracle and the Emirati investment firm MGX. The investors’ association with Mr. Trump had raised concerns among some TikTok users that the new venture would slant the app’s content in a more conservative direction.
A spokeswoman for TikTok said on Tuesday that the new U.S. entity had not updated its algorithm since the joint venture was announced. As part of the agreement to spin out the new venture, TikTok’s U.S. operation is planning to retrain the content recommendation algorithm that it will be licensing from ByteDance. The creation of the U.S. TikTok was aimed at addressing longstanding national security concerns about ByteDance’s ties to China.
On Sunday, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, re-shared a post on X from before Mr. Pretti was killed that accused TikTok of “censoring” content critical of Mr. Trump and ICE. “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,” Mr. Murphy wrote in his post.
A spokeswoman for the app said in an email that it was “inaccurate to report that this is anything but the technical issues we’ve transparently confirmed.”
David McCabe is a Times reporter who covers the complex legal and policy issues created by the digital economy and new technologies.
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