California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday that he was launching a review of TikTok after complaints began over the weekend, with some users alleging censorship as they tried to post videos related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Saturday’s fatal shooting in Minneapolis.
TikTok, which recently split off its U.S. operations in a deal backed by the Trump administration, has attributed the issues to a power outage at a data center.
“It’s time to investigate,” Newsom wrote on Threads. “I am launching a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content.”
Jamie Favazza, head of communications for TikTok’s new U.S. business, told NBC News that the worries of censorship were unfounded and that the problems were due to the data center outage. New posts may still have lingering issues, she said, while the company works with the data center to fully restore service.
The company said Monday evening on X that it was “continuing to resolve a major infrastructure issue” that had caused some videos to incorrectly and temporarily be labeled as having zero views.
The statements came after a wave of online outrage over the killing of Alex Pretti, 37, an intensive care nurse, in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. As users tried to post videos about the killing, many found that they were unable to publish, that they didn’t see the number of views they expected on their videos or that their videos had been put in a review process. The interruptions became the first impression many TikTok users got of the platform’s new U.S.-based leadership, following a deal touted by President Donald Trump and announced Thursday.
That day, TikTok’s previous owner, the Chinese company ByteDance, finalized an agreement to sell its U.S. operations to a group of investors that includes Oracle, whose chief technology officer, co-founder Larry Ellison, is a top Trump ally. The investors announced their collaboration the same day, along with changes that will be made to TikTok’s algorithm and Trust & Safety practices. No timeline was given for those changes.
Many TikTok users have said the sale could spell the beginning of the end of the platform’s status as a place to share news and analysis that is often progressive and critical of right-wing and conservative politics.
The corporate changes, along with the tech issues over the weekend, raised suspicions among many users that political censorship was occurring, especially censorship of criticism of the Trump administration and ICE’s activities in Minneapolis. Across social media platforms like Threads, Instagram, X and Bluesky, users said that their political content on TikTok was getting unusually low visibility or that their accounts had been restricted or banned from the platform when they tried to comment on ICE enforcement in Minneapolis.
Journalist David Leavitt wrote on X that “TikTok has begun censoring anti-Trump and anti-Ice content” and shared a screenshot of videos on his profile that had been flagged as “Ineligible for Recommendation.” The post accumulated over 1 million views, with Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., replying in a quote post, “I know it’s hard to track all the threats to democracy out there right now, but this is at the top of the list.”
The speculation around the issues traveled widely over the weekend, from highly followed influencers to celebrities.
Prominent celebrities such as actor Megan Stalter and singer-songwriter Billie Eilish also put up posts on Instagram with claims that TikTok was censoring content related to ICE. Eilish wrote in an Instagram story Monday that “tiktok is silencing people btw…” and shared a TikTok video of her brother, Finneas O’Connell, speaking about Pretti that got a little over 100 likes.
Stalter wrote in her post Sunday: “TT is under new ownership and we are being completely censored and monitored. I’m unable to upload anything about �� even after I tried to trick the page by making it look like a comedy video.”
Democratic political analyst Emily Amick said on Instagram that she had been “posting about ICE” and that her account was later suspended, adding, “LOTS of political creators have been getting NO VIEWS on content 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 said in an interview. “And then I got that notice that I was suspended.”
“It’s a very weird suspension notice,” she added. “I don’t know what the nature of the suspension was. I appealed it and said, ‘I make all my own content,’ and now I’m able to post again, but I’m getting very low views. I was at zero for a number of hours, and now it’s at 23 views for a post.”
NBC News employees also experienced issues with the app. Attempts to upload videos over the weekend were met with error messages. Eventually, uploaded videos were put under review or were posted but didn’t get views or comments.
A top thread on the popular TikTok subreddit titled “Should we delete TikTok en masse?” warned of the new ownership’s affiliations. Dozens of users suggested moving to a similar platform, like YouTube Shorts or another alternative short video app, UpScrolled. UpScrolled was the ninth-most-downloaded social networking app on Apple’s App Store on Monday evening, having moved up five spots in less than 24 hours.
Some users also said TikTok’s updated privacy policy, released the day the deal was finalized, added to their hesitancy to embrace the platform under the new ownership. Users discovered that the updated policy disclosed that TikTok could access users’ “sensitive personal information,” including “citizenship or immigration status,” as well as “precise location data.” But those disclosures are actually not new, according to TechCrunch, and they appear to be an attempt to comply with California law.
David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to online civil liberties, said that while it isn’t fully clear to him what happened over the weekend, the change in ownership creates the possibility of political influence over the app.
“We and many other critics of the TikTok ban urged Members of Congress on both sides to oppose the TikTok ban on many grounds. But among them was the extraordinary ability it granted the president — and whoever would happen to be president — to control ownership (and thus the editorial policy) of TikTok,” Greene said in an email. “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.”
Despite the fears of conservative ownership, TikTok’s sale originated with a bipartisan Biden-era effort — driven by a fear that TikTok was alleged to have given China unprecedented influence over Americans — to ban TikTok in the U.S. if ByteDance wouldn’t sell the company to give it majority-American ownership.
