Censorship claims, technical problems and a report of a surge in app deletions are just some of the challenges TikTok is facing as it adjusts to a new ownership structure in the United States that was finalized last week.
The company said Monday it was experiencing a “major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage” at one of its U.S. data center partner sites. The outage led to bugs such as creators temporarily seeing zero views on their videos
even if people had looked at them, as well as slow load times and timeout requests when posting videos.
On Tuesday, TikTok said it had made significant progress restoring services though users could still see glitches while using the popular video sharing app.
At the same time, users were raising concerns that the company is “censoring” videos, including ones critical of President Donald Trump, ICE or mentions of Jeffrey Epstein. The complaints were enough for California Gov. Gavin Newsom to announce on X Monday that he is launching a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content.
Jamie Favazza, a spokesperson for TikTok's new U.S. joint venture, said it is inaccurate to say that the problems users have been encountering are “anything but the technical issues we’ve transparently confirmed.”
Still, the technical problems combined with the ties that some of the new owners have to Trump bristled some U.S. users just enough to delete the app. Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower said Tuesday that daily average app uninstalls grew 130% from Jan. 22 to Jan. 26 compared with the previous 30 days. However, daily average users still increased by 2% in the same period, which Sensor Tower says suggests the uninstalls had little effect on overall usage. And while TikTok lagged YouTube and Instagram in U.S. user growth, people spent more time on the platform than its rivals.
Minda Smiley, a social media analyst at research firm Emarketer, noted that ownership change did just happen and that TikTok is going through a lot of infrastructure-related shifts, which can lead to technical issues. But if there are still problems with certain videos not uploading, or the censorship claims persist, TikTok could see bigger issues down the line.
“Optics and perceptions are really important in situations like this, so I would stay like regardless of what’s actually happening, if people do feel as if content is being suppressed or content is difficult to upload or is being moderated or whatever it might be, that’s enough reason for a lot of users to flee or to stop using TikTok or to say they’re going to stop using TikTok,” she said.
That being said, “what users say and do is often different,” she added. After all, it was only a year ago that TikTok users were flocking to RedNote, a Chinese social media app, to protest a potential TikTok ban. The protest didn't last and RedNote doesn't see much discussion in the U.S. these days.
“Still, I think my point still stands that if this continues and people do feel as if the algorithm is changing, the content is changing, it certainly presents a challenge for TikTok,” Smiley added.
