As Newsom slams suppression of anti-Trump content, TikTok blames a technical glitch

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he is investigating reports that TikTok is suppressing anti-Trump content days after the platform averted a nationwide ban by finalizing a U.S. ownership deal backed by the president.

“Following TikTok’s sale to a Trump-aligned business group, our office has received reports — and independently confirmed instances — of suppressed content critical of President Trump,” the governor’s press office said in a Monday evening statement on X.

The announcement comes after a flurry of online complaints that videos criticizing Trump, such as those condemning Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in Minnesota or speaking out against the killing of U.S. citizen Alex Pretti by federal agents, are either getting zero views or far lower view counts than normal.

The new U.S. TikTok, officially the TikTok U.S. Data Security Joint Venture LLC, has denied allegations of suppressing content critical of ICE, saying on X that a power outage at a U.S. data center resulted in “technical issues” that began on Sunday.

The glitch meant “new posts may temporarily take longer than normal to publish and be recommended,” TikTok’s U.S. venture’s spokesperson said in an email.

The power outage “caused a cascading systems failure” that, among other effects, resulted in some creators temporarily seeing “0” views or likes on their videos, TikTok’s U.S. venture wrote in a post on X Monday afternoon.

On Tuesday morning, the U.S. venture said in a post on X that it had made “significant progress” in recovering its U.S. infrastructure, though some technical issues may remain, “including when posting new content.”

Thousands of user issues were being reported throughout the day Monday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. The number had dropped to about 300 reported user issues by Tuesday morning.

Newsom’s press office said on Monday the governor was calling on the California Department of Justice to review whether the application violates state law by censoring content that is unfavorable to Trump.

The department said in a statement that it is unable to confirm or deny any potential investigations. The statement added that free speech is a cornerstone of democracy and “as a nation, we are stronger when we engage in a robust and diverse public discourse.”

“It’s time to investigate,” Newsom wrote on X while reposting a screenshot showing a TikTok user being prevented from sending a message saying “epstein” — an apparent reference to Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender and former close friend of Trump. The president drew bipartisan criticism last year for his efforts to prevent the Department of Justice’s Epstein-related investigation files from being made public.

The screenshot says: “This message may be in violation of our Community Guidelines, and has not been sent to protect our community.”

The U.S. TikTok’s spokesperson said the company doesn’t have rules against sharing the name “Epstein” and is working to fix the issue, which applied to some users and reiterated that the “ongoing technical issues” were to blame.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson told the Washington Post that the White House “is not involved in, nor has it made requests related to, TikTok’s content moderation.”

Internet personality Preston Stewart, who makes informational videos about war and national security topics, said that two videos he posted Monday simply disappeared while another video received zero views despite him having 1.3 million followers.

“I’ve seen folks suggest this is targeted but from what I’m seeing it’s across platform affecting everyone,” Stewart wrote on X.

Musician Finneas — brother of singer Billie Eilish — wrote on an Instagram story that he had been “shadowbanned” by the app after his post speaking out against ICE’s fatal shooting of Pretti received less engagement than his usual posts. Finneas has nearly 4 million TikTok followers.

Freelance writer David Leavitt said in an email that two of three posts he made the day following the ownership change — one about ICE protests in Minneapolis and another mocking Trump — were blocked.

TikTok had flagged both of his videos as “ineligible for recommendation,” meaning the videos would not appear in people’s feeds or personalized “For You” pages, stunting their reach, according to Leavitt, who said Tuesday morning that he was still experiencing the same issue.

The company has said it is not taking down or restricting any ICE-related content in keeping with its community guidelines, and said that its guidelines, which ban content featuring hate speech or nudity, among other topics, have not changed since the ownership transfer, the U.S. venture’s spokesperson said.

Nonetheless, frustration continued to spread online among creators, celebrities and elected officials who did feel like content was being deliberately suppressed.

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) asserted that TikTok is “now state-controlled media” in a Monday morning statement on X. He shared a screenshot showing that a video he posted about his legislative proposal to allow people to sue ICE agents received zero views, compared with the thousands on his regular content.

“TikTok is dead. Killed by the regime & the corrupt kleptocrats suckling at its teat,” he wrote in a Monday evening X post, reposting another screenshot, this time showing extremely low view counts on CNN’s recently shared videos.

TikTok finalized a deal Thursday to spin off its U.S. operations into a new majority-American joint venture with investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX. The $14-billion deal puts Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle and a longtime Trump supporter and donor, in a powerful position over the app’s operations in America.

Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at UCLA, said that because there is little publicly known about the algorithms behind social media platforms beyond that they are designed to show attention-grabbing content, it is hard to tell if the changes users are reporting are deliberate moves by the company.

Srinivasan, an expert on the effects of technology on society, said he finds the lack of transparency about how social media algorithms work troubling. Most people get their news through social media platforms, which play an important role in shaping people’s shared understanding of reality. TikTok, in particular, was often seen by young people as the platform to get insight into global news, including what was “really” happening in Gaza, he said.

Broadly defined, algorithms are a set of rules applied to a body of data. “The problem is we don’t know the rules and we don’t know the data,” he said. “All we can do is guess what’s going on.”

“If all of a sudden a particular content creator or a user who’s posting does not see their content go viral, that does speak to the likelihood that on the back end there have been … changes to the algorithm that determines the visibility and virality of content,” Srinivasan said.

Social media platforms are no strangers to various censorship accusations.

Conservatives have long accused Facebook of being biased against right-wing views, and in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, claimed the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to take down content related to the COVID-19 pandemic and said he regretted not previously being “more outspoken” about it.

Free speech rhetoric was also front and center when Elon Musk bought Twitter, which he renamed X.

Musk had written in his Securities and Exchange Commission filing that he thought Twitter had the potential to be the “platform for free speech around the globe.” Twitter had at the time suspended Trump from the platform after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.