This past weekend, the comedian/actor Meg Stalter announced via Instagram that she'll be shutting down her TikTok account. The reason? Her multiple attempts to upload a video denouncing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s violent actions—including the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti—were seemingly shadowbanned. Even a clip that Stalter disguised as one of her regular comedy skits was buried. A couple of screen recordings Stalter posted show that the videos she uploaded had zero views, despite her 278K following.
Her announcement was met with frustration from fans and users who’d experienced similar glitches ("Same girl, same. Been trying to delete all day, but it keeps “freezing,” HGTV host Bobby Berk commented.) The artist Billie Eilish raised a similar concern about the app's content moderation. Yesterday, she posted a screenshot of an anti-ICE video her brother/collaborator Finneas posted on TikTok. Though he's got 3.9 million followers, it only had 114 likes. (“tiktok is silencing people btw…” Billie captioned the post.)
Glitches were widespread on the app this past weekend, impacting non-political content as well. At any other moment in time, these content stalls might've been dismissed as fickle tech bugs. But today, as ICE agents violently patrol neighborhoods across the country, civilians have used TikTok as a platform to monitor and condemn the agency’s actions; so there’s growing speculation about why certain content is being held up. And it doesn't help that the app’s recent bugs coincide with its brand-new ownership and privacy policy, one that’s been branded as outright government surveillance by some of its users.
This new policy was unveiled last week. That's when the app's Chinese parent company ByteDance, finalized a Trump-endorsed deal that gave a group of American investors (including Oracle CEO/Trump ally Larry Ellison) majority ownership of the platform. Now, once users opt in to the new policy’s pop-up agreement (the same sort of pop-up "terms and services" notification that often goes unscrutinized by casual social media users), they grant TikTok permission to access their precise location data, as opposed to the broader location info the app used to track.
TikTok can also track and store any data it collects from your interactions with its AI tools, and it’ll also use stored data to inform which ads are served to you on the platform. The agreement also states that the app can gather “information you disclose in survey responses or in your user content about your racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.”
But as many noticed, the app's new era began with major glitches. Over the past week, people have reported issues logging in, being served dated, random, untailored content on their FYPs, and (like Stalter and Finneas), attempts to post that are left “under review,” and uploads that go completely unseen.
The censorship argument mainly points to TikTok’s new ownership, which has been enthusiastically endorsed by the Trump administration. Users in droves have flagged that their videos condemning ICE’s recent violent actions have been held up due to glitches, and the hashtag #TikTokCensorship trended on X over the weekend. In one recent post, the creator @Meg_is_Magic shared that her video using the hashtag #fuckice was taken down for violating community guidelines. “Those of you who aren’t in the United States, I know y'all see more about our country than we do.” The Trump administration has deployed a record number of immigration officers carrying out violent enforcement tactics in communities nationwide, and Donald Trump celebrated the new TikTok deal on social media last week. (“[TikTok] will now be owned by a group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World, and will be an important Voice,” the president boasted on Truth Social last week.)
Anti-ICE videos aren’t the only kind that’ve been impacted by recent tech issues. The Verge recently reported that some content from UK news channels like the BBC and The Guardian couldn’t be viewed in the States.
This morning, the TikTok USDA Joint Venture released a statement that blamed the glitches on a data outage: "Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate," the company shared on X. "We're working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We're sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon."
Meanwhile, plenty have joined the likes of Stalter and Finneas and vowed to delete the app. (“A mass delete would be very, very good,” one user commented on Stalter’s post.) Today, the White House shared in a statement via The Washington Post that they’re “not involved in, nor has it made requests related to, TikTok’s content moderation.” Only time will tell whether members of the #deletetiktok movement will choose to believe them.
Annabel Iwegbue is a culture editor at Cosmopolitan, where she primarily covers pop culture, lifestyle, relationships, and digital trends. She previously wrote for Harper's Bazaar, The Knockturnal, and Black Film. She's originally from Charleston, South Carolina, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a B.A. in Journalism and Cinema Studies from New York University. You can check out some of Annabel’s work here and also find her on Instagram and Twitter.
