TikTok users claim censorship of Trump criticism and Epstein references
Users of TikTok in the United States reported that the platform blocked messages containing the word "Epstein" and suppressed videos critical of President Trump or documenting ICE enforcement actions, following ByteDance's divestiture of its US operations to Trump-backed investors.
What happened
Less than one week after ByteDance completed the divestiture of TikTok's US operations to Trump-backed investors, TikTok users reported being unable to write the word 'Epstein' in messages and complained that videos critical of President Trump were suppressed.
California Governor Gavin Newsom announced he would investigate whether TikTok violated state law through content censorship. State Senator Scott Wiener reported that a video he uploaded about legal action against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received zero views and was suppressed from the platform.
TikTok attributed the platform's issues to 'a serious infrastructure problem' caused by a power outage at one of its US data centers, stating that while the network was restored, the outage caused cascading system failures that the company was working to resolve.
Reported impact
Users claimed that content critical of the Trump administration was being suppressed and that messages containing references to Jeffrey Epstein were being blocked by automated systems.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.