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TikTok users in the US have reported being unable to write the word ‘Epstein’ in messages amid accusations that the social media platform is suppressing content critical of President Donald Trump.
The issues come less than a week after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, was forced to divest a majority stake in its US operations to a group of investors loyal to President Trump, who was a close associate with the late convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Since the takeover, TikTok users have also claimed that videos about US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and protests in Minneapolis have also been censored.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said that he will probe whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring content.
“It’s time to investigate,” he wrote in a post to X on Monday night. “I am launching a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content.”
His post came in response to a screenshot shared by an X user showing that a message with the word ‘Epstein’ was blocked by TikTok for being “in violation of our Community Guidelines”.
Another Californian Democrat, Senator Scott Wiener, said that one of his videos about how to sue ICE had been suppressed by TikTok.
“TikTok is now state-controlled media,” Senator Wiener wrote on X on Monday. “This morning I posted a TikTok about my legislation allowing people to sue ICE agents. It’s sitting at zero views, and I’m not the only person this is happening to.”
TikTok has attributed the recent issues with its platform to a “major infrastructure” problem brought about by a power outage at one of its US data centres.
“While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve together with our data center partner,” a company statement said.
“You may notice multiple bugs, slower load times, or timed-out requests, including when posting new content. Creators may temporarily see ‘O’ views or likes on videos, and your earnings may look like they’re missing. This is a display error caused by server timeouts.”
The Independent has reached out to TikTok for further information about specific mentions of ‘Epstein’ or ‘ICE’, and what influence the new ownership will have on content moderation decisions going forward.
