Tech companies such as TikTok, Meta (which owns Facebook) and YouTube (owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google) often face scrutiny over how platforms surface content during moments of heightened political division or make major changes to their algorithms. Content is sometimes throttled, blocked or removed for a wide variety of unanticipated reasons.

Automated moderation systems can make mistakes as they filter violent or hateful content, and algorithms sometimes flag users who make sudden changes to the type of content they post. This latest incident illustrates how TikTok will likely face scepticism under new ownership from its large, younger user base over how it treats dicey political content.

TikTok said on Thursday (local time) that it had finalised its deal to spin off its US business to non-Chinese investors, just before the deadline of US President Donald Trump’s suspension of a ban on the platform if it didn’t change ownership.

The new US company, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, is controlled by a consortium of US businesses that include Trump allies such as Oracle, whose executive chairman, Larry Ellison, has assembled an array of media properties friendly to Trump.

TikTok said in a post on X that it has “been working to restore our services following a power outage at a US data centre impacting TikTok and other apps we operate”. The company added that it’s working with the data centre “to stabilise our service”.

The White House said in a statement that the “White House is not involved in, nor has it made requests related to, TikTok’s content moderation”.

Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor, said in a Bluesky post that a video he uploaded to TikTok criticising the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had been “under review” for nine hours and still couldn’t be shared.

Vladeck said he argued in the video that the DHS’s recent assertions that its officers had the authority to enter homes without judicial warrants in immigration cases were “bunk”.

“I know it’s hard to track all the threats to democracy out there right now, but this is at the top of the list,” Senator Chris Murphy (Democratic Party, Connecticut) said on X.

Other US-based tech companies have faced similar complaints. Last year, after Meta announced it was ending its fact-checking programme, among several other Republican-friendly content rules, abortion pill providers complained after Instagram suspended their accounts, some of which were later restored by the company, which said it was not related to the new policies.

In 2023, thousands of supporters of Palestinians complained that their posts were being suppressed by Meta’s social networks – an incident the company blamed on an internal bug. In the United States, Republicans have long accused TikTok of overemphasising liberal-leaning content on the platform, especially videos about the Israel-Gaza war and Trump.

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