TikTok has been accused of censoring content that makes President Donald Trump look bad following a recent deal.
TikTok is facing criticism and an investigation after being flooded with claims of censorship over the weekend. The day before the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, TikTok users noticed they were unable to post videos that were critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement .
Other users reported being unable to send messages with the word “Epstein.” The timing, which coincided with a new U.S.-ownership deal, sparked backlash from every corner of social media, including politicians, influencers, and celebrities, who speculated it was part of a coordinated push to keep anti-Trump content off the app. TikTok has denied any censorship on the app. TikTok USDS Joint Venture told Newsweek there's nothing barring people from posting or sending messages about “Epstein,” and the term was being flagged incorrectly by the app's safety system. The rationale did little to calm the criticism, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said he would launch a review of whether TikTok violated state law by censoring content critical of President Donald Trump. While the alleged “Epstein” censorship added fuel to the fire, the bulk of the criticism against TikTok has been about the alleged suppression of anti-ICE messages, especially in the wake of Pretti's death. TikTok again denied any suppression of content related to the shooting and said the issues users experienced over the weekend were due to a data center outage. Author David Leavitt, who has 14,400 followers on TikTok, shared a screenshot of a video he was trying to upload that said, “ineligible for recommendation,” and wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that TikTok had begun “censoring anti-Trump and anti-ICE content.” Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, reposted Leavitt’s message and called the alleged censorship “top of the list” of the threats to democracy America is facing. File Photo: A person holds a smartphone displaying the TikTok logo in front of President Donald Trump's Truth Social profile page. Musician Finneas O’Connell, the brother of pop star Billie Eilish, has 3.9 million followers on TikTok, and a video he posted over the weekend about Pretti’s death got a little over 100 likes. Eilish posted the video on her Instagram with the caption that TikTok was “silencing people.” The video has since amassed hundreds of thousands of likes and comments from people accusing TikTok of silencing O’Connell. Democratic political analyst Emily Amick posted on Instagram that her account was suspended after she was posting about ICE. “I’ve been posting just a couple videos about ICE stuff recently, and I tried to post—it was actually a video about the ice storm, using the word ‘ice,’ obviously—and it wouldn’t allow me to post it,” Amick told NBC News. “And then I got that notice that I was suspended.” After appealing the suspension, Amick said she was able to post again but was at “zero for a number of hours.” Pretti was shot by federal agents at 10:05 a.m. ET on Saturday, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and hours later, TikTok users were unable to post content to the site. The last video Newsweek successfully posted to its account was published at 3:57 p.m., and by 5 p.m., the content failed to upload. On Tuesday, TikTok labeled one of Newsweek’s videos of the shooting as “sensitive content,” a designation that the platform says can affect its circulation on the app. TikTok did not censor the video of Renee Nicole Good being shot by an ICE agent earlier this month, which amassed more than 10 million views on Newsweek’s account. The problems over the weekend sparked tons of questions from users who wondered why their videos weren’t getting viewed. From their perspective, the video on their profile played like any normal day, except there were 0 views. But, for some, the problem wasn’t that no one was watching them; it was that they weren’t being uploaded to the social media app. When they tapped the “copy link” button on a video with 0 views, a message popped up: “Post is processing.” So, while users saw the video on their profile as if it had been posted normally, visitors to their profile couldn’t view it. The problems persisted on Sunday, and on Monday, Newsweek noticed that some of the videos that had been processing had properly posted. It wasn’t until Tuesday that the app worked normally. Hacks star Megan Stalter posted on Instagram that she tried to upload a video to TikTok for “hours,” but it wouldn’t show to a single person. She said she was deleting her account due to censorship. Searches for “how to delete your TikTok,” surged amid the accusations, according to a Newsweek analysis of Google Trends data. Searches reached an all-time high on Monday. A popular Reddit thread had people proposing that users delete their accounts en masse to send a message and move to a different platform. Part of the hesitancy to stay on the app stems from concerns about the new ownership deal announced on Thursday. After TikTok’s fate was hanging in the balance for years, the company said it reached an agreement to establish a majority-American-owned venture. One of the three managing investors is Oracle, which is owned by Larry Ellison, an ally and financial supporter of President Donald Trump. Trump praised the owners as being “great American Patriots,” and the chumminess between Ellison and Trump fueled speculation that the app was trying to suppress content that made Trump look bad. David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to online civil liberties, told NBC News that the president got the “extraordinary ability” to control ownership of TikTok. “When Trump said he ‘would save TikTok,’ we explained that that meant he would arrange to have it sold to someone beholden to him, or otherwise willing to do his bidding,” Greene said. It wasn’t just political content that wasn’t being processed in a timely manner; content creators who post about being moms, emotional translation, and other topics completely unrelated to ICE, Trump, or other political themes also saw their videos getting stuck in the processing stage.
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