It didn’t take long for things to get weird after TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, handed the app’s U.S. reins over to a slate of American investors approved by President Donald Trump.
In the days after the hand-off was made last Thursday, many users reported their posts were stuck at zero views if they included specific words like “ICE,” “Israel,” “Trump,” or “Jeffrey Epstein.”
At first, TikTok officials tried to quell conspiracies by announcing that the platform’s data center was experiencing an unfortunate “weather-related power outage.”
PARTNERS IN PEDOPHILIA: Sarah Baus, left, of Charleston, S.C., and Tiffany Cianci, who says she is a "long-form educational content creator," livestream to TikTok outside the Supreme Court, on Jan. 10, 2025.
But users claimed that their direct messages were also being blocked if they included mention of convicted sex abuser Epstein—a once-dear friend of Trump’s. TikTok also denied any moves to block messages.
TikTok’s new controlling board is consistently pro-Trump. Billionaire Larry Ellison’s cloud computing company, Oracle, is a player. Investment firm MGX, founded by a member of the United Arab Emirates’ royal family, is also on the board.
MGX has been involved in a handful of cryptocurrency deals that were lucrative for the Trump family, including one that funneled $2 billion through the Trump-owned trading platform World Liberty Financial. Other Trump allies, like Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell and Jeff Yass—a multibillionaire MAGA donor who also chipped in on Trump's vanity ballroom—also have a presence on the board.
Whether it’s a matter of the new owners covering for their powerful pal or just a really big fumble after taking over, the timing is uncanny.
It wasn’t lost on Democrats that the social media blackout occurred in the crucial hours following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by Border Patrol agents.
During that time, influencers, civilians, and lawmakers could not share videos and information on the senseless death and its aftermath.
Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, who is running for Congress in California, posted to X over the weekend that TikTok had become “state-controlled media” after the U.S. takeover.
“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,” he wrote.
Multiple left-leaning accounts with large followings reported similar issues of zero or significantly impacted views.
The timing of TikTok’s alleged technical difficulties—and who is being impacted—has caught the attention of other lawmakers, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“It’s time to investigate,” Newsom said Monday night via X. “I am launching a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content.”
According to CNN, Newsom’s press office said it received “independently confirmed instances” in which content that was “critical of” President Trump was “suppressed.”
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut also said he was launching an investigation.
“It’s interesting to me that on the same weekend TikTok was taken over by a bunch of Trump-aligned billionaires, we saw some pretty massive censoring of anti-Trump content,” Murphy told NOTUS. “I don’t know that those two things are connected, but I think it’s really important for us to be vigilant.”
Related | CBS News disgraces itself as parent company bends to Trump
With the Department of Justice’s continued delay on releasing the Epstein files and Trump’s continued attacks on media outlets critical of him, it’s possible the shoe fits.
No comments:
Post a Comment