Some of us might see social media as this fun place where people share humorous videos, dance challenges, food recommendations, and so on. But it is also a powerful tool used to share messages with the world. To air grievances that might otherwise go ignored. Now that TikTok is under US control, there are some who are speculating that it could be going through censorship when the platform went down over the weekend .
TikTok in the US is down for some
What’s interesting is the timing of these issues. It was just last week that the deal to hand over TikTok US operations to a US entity was complete, and now the app is down? This has led some to speculate that maybe censorship could be at hand. It sounds far-fetched, but at the same time maybe not.
This is because as part of the deal, the new owners of TikTok will handle US content moderation. This is compared to before, when the purview fell under ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, which is based in China. Plus, TikTok US’ new owners are friendly with the Trump administration, and given the protests in Minneapolis, it’s hard not to put two and two together.
That being said, The Verge notes that some TikTok users outside the US, also reported issues. This means that there is a chance it could be a general outage, as opposed to TikTok’s new owners trying to censor online content. A more plausible explanation could be that this outage could have been caused by backend changes during the migration.
Algorithm changes
One of the main selling points of TikTok was its algorithm. It had the uncanny ability to detect videos you enjoyed watching. This helped the algorithm push more relatable content to users.
However, as part of the deal, TikTok’s new US owners will license the algorithm from ByteDance . It will also be retrained with US user data. This could be another reason why some users are finding that the algorithm for their For You Page has been reset. We are curious if TikTok US will be a very different experience compared to the rest of the world.
More importantly, whether or not these changes could have a positive or negative impact on content creators. After all, many creators have relied on TikTok’s current algorithm to push their content.
