Now that the TikTok US deal is closed and the app’s operations fall under its new American owners, will there be any form of censorship? That’s something the state of California is trying to find out by calling for an investigation into the app .
California wants to investigate TikTok US for censorship
In many ways, it’s kind of funny. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a company based in China. China is also known for being heavy-handed on censorship, in particular around topics that might criticize the government or expose certain failings. But back then, no one really raised questions about it.
However, now that the TikTok US deal is complete , and with TikTok’s US operations brought under a newly-created entity, why is the topic of censorship being brought up?
If you recall, last Sunday TikTok experienced a brief outage. This led to users being unable to upload videos, with uploads placed under the “pending” status. Some users also reported that their “For You Page” had been reset. While it might have been easy to chalk this up to server or data migration issues, some speculated that censorship could have been in play .
This is because the timing of the outage was also around the time of the ICE protests in Minneapolis. We’ve seen this type of social media censorship before in other countries. Back in 2014, China blocked Instagram during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. While we don’t really want to fan the flames of conspiracy, it’s hard not to draw parallels here.
Claims of proof of censorship
So, the question is, is TikTok US being censored? We don’t have the proof yet, but apparently California does. According to a post on X by Governor Newsom’s office , they claim that they have independently confirmed instances of content critical of US President Donald Trump being suppressed. So much so that Newsom announced plans to review whether or not the app has violated state law.
That being said, TikTok has denied that it is censoring content. Instead, the company claims that the outage was due to technical issues. In a statement made to the BBC, a TikTok spokesperson said, “We’ve made significant progress in recovering our US infrastructure with our US data center partner. However, the US user experience may still have some technical issues, including when posting new content.”
