As a consortium of investors led by Oracle's Larry Ellison took control of TikTok's U.S. business, users accused the app of throttling videos about Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and posts related to the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Posts went viral on social media pinning the perceived suppression of content on TikTok's new bosses. The hashtag #TikTokCensorship gained traction on X, droves of users downloaded TikTok alternatives and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and lawmakers in the European Union, called for investigations.
But a data center outage that wreaked havoc on the platform appears to have disrupted all categories of posts, rather than singling out political content, according to a new analysis in the publication Good Authority. It was conducted by eight academics examining how videos were trending during the ownership transition.
Using viewership metrics across more than 100,000 videos, the researchers zeroed in on videos about ICE, Pretti, Renee Good, the woman killed by an ICE agent last month and the keywords "Trump" and "Epstein." They compared how often TikTok recommended the content compared with non-political posts about things like food recipes and the Oscars.
Around the time of TikTok's server outage, "posts about all of these topics dropped to almost zero," wrote Benjamin Guinaudeau, a professor at Université Laval in Québec, and his seven co-authors. "Total views plummeted directly after the TikTok outage, and then began to rebound."
While cries of systemic top-down political censorship do not appear to be supported by publicly available data, the researchers say it is still possible the new owners of TikTok have begun to reconfigure content rules.
"It could be that small numbers of posts were removed or shadowbanned in a way that is not visible in the overall trends," wrote the researchers, who added that users who experienced that the word "Epstein" was being blocked in private direct messages was not possible to study, since that data is not accessible.
Part of the challenge in studying TikTok, the academics note, is that the platform does not grant the type of access to researchers required to do comprehensive reviews of how content moderation is unfolding — what is being amplified, what is being suppressed and what priorities or policies may be driving those trends.
"Our position is that TikTok and other platforms should provide a way for third-party researchers to study their recommender systems and look for evidence of undue political influence," the researchers wrote.
The timing of the TikTok disruption struck a nerve because many users have expressed wariness about how Ellison, a staunch ally of President Trump, could remake the app in his vision, just as the Ellison family has overhauled CBS in bid to appeal to conservatives.
In addition to Ellison's Oracle, a cloud computing and data center giant, TikTok's new investors include Silver Lake, a prominent private equity firm, and Emerati-based investment company MGX. ByteDance, TikTok's corporate parent company in Beijing, will retain a minority stake of the new U.S. entity, as well as still own the powerful algorithm, which will be retrained using Americans' data.
A TikTok spokeswoman said no changes have been made to its algorithm since the new investors took the reins of the social media company's American business. The deal was struck to bring the app in compliance with a federal law that required TikTok distance itself from its Chinese parent company over national security concerns.
"Right now, TikTok can say just about anything related to algorithm changes and we can't verify it," Guinaudeau told NPR.
He added: "Now we could see massive changes like if they suddenly stopped showing all political content, which was one of the accusations we examine in the post. But until they make more extensive data available to researchers it's nearly impossible to detect subtle changes to their 'For You' recommender system ('the algorithm')."
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