We’re just a few days into TikTok’s new U.S. ownership and, thus far, users are skeptical. And, to be fair, it has been a relatively uneasy start.
In case you missed it, TikTok’s new U.S. ownership group — a venture stocked with supporters of President Donald Trump — took power about a week ago. It’s been rocky since. Here’s what you need to know.
TikTok’s outage issue
Shortly after switching ownership, TikTok went down, which wasn’t taken as a great sign. The platform crashed over the weekend, the company citing a power outage at a U.S. data center as the culprit.
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“We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service,” the company said in a statement. “We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”
The outage was resolved, but that wasn’t the end of complaints from users.
Mashable Trend Report
User complaints and worries about blocked speech
Since TikTok’s new ownership group was finalized, folks have been worried about the platform blocking speech, perhaps because a Trump ally took power. And users this week began complaining that some posts seemed to be blocked or shadowbanned. Folks suggested that posts about ICE were either being suppressed or would not post. Pop star Billie Eilish, for instance, posted an Instagram story saying, “tiktok is silencing people btw” that showed her brother Finneas’ anti-ICE post garnering hardly any engagement. Hacks actress Meg Stalter said she was unable to upload an anti-ICE post to TikTok at all. These claims echoed similar complaints from other users. Some folks also claimed that messages with the word “Epstein” produced an error message, which CNBC reported it was able to recreate.
It is difficult to confirm whether users’ content is being blocked or shadowbanned, but TikTok has said that it is not doing so.
TikTok told CNN that the issues were glitches related to the power outage and that the problems were “unrelated to last week’s news.” The company also told CNBC that users should not be blocked from messaging the word “Epstein” and that it was investigating the issue, among the other issues.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable but it did point to previous public statements regarding the outage and its effects.
“We’ve made significant progress in recovering our U.S. infrastructure with our U.S. data center partner,” it posted on Tuesday. “However, the U.S. user experience may still have some technical issues, including when posting new content. We’re committed to bringing TikTok back to its full capacity as soon as possible.”
All in all, it has been quite a rocky start for the new TikTok ownership group — time will tell if things get a bit steadier.
