After a U.S.-led investor group headed by Oracle’s Larry Ellison took control of TikTok’s American operations, users accused the app of throttling videos about Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Those complaints spread across other platforms, the hashtag #TikTokCensorship trended, many users tried alternative apps, and officials requested investigations.
A team of eight academics published an analysis in Good Authority that challenges claims of deliberate, systematic political suppression. Using publicly available viewership data for more than 100,000 videos, the researchers tracked how TikTok recommended content about ICE, Alex Pretti, Renee Good (the woman killed by an ICE agent) and keywords like “Trump” and “Epstein,” and compared those trends to nonpolitical categories such as food recipes and Oscars coverage.
The paper finds the sharp decline in views coincided with a data center outage rather than a topic-specific action. Around the time of the outage, “posts about all of these topics dropped to almost zero,” the authors write. Total views across categories plunged and later rebounded, suggesting the drop was platform-wide and not limited to politically sensitive content.
The authors stress important caveats. Publicly available metrics cannot exclude subtler forms of moderation: small numbers of posts might have been removed or shadowbanned in ways invisible in aggregate trends, and private direct messages — where some users reported blocked words — are not accessible for study. More fundamentally, TikTok does not grant researchers the level of access needed to comprehensively audit its recommender system to determine what is amplified or suppressed and why.
Because of those limits, the analysts urge TikTok and other platforms to provide third-party researchers with tools and access to examine recommender systems for undue political influence. The timing of the outage and ownership change intensified public worry: Ellison is a prominent ally of former President Trump, and the Ellison family’s recent moves in media have drawn criticism that they favor conservative perspectives. Georgetown law professor Anupam Chander said the new owners “will have to earn the trust of Americans” and could demonstrate neutrality by welcoming academic scrutiny and diverse hires.
TikTok’s new U.S. investors include Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Emirati investment company MGX. ByteDance retains a minority stake in the U.S. entity and will continue to own and retrain the algorithm using Americans’ data, while Oracle is to supervise the algorithm — an arrangement some observers say may not fully shield the system from outside influence.
A TikTok spokeswoman said there have been no algorithm changes since the U.S. takeover. Researchers note such claims are difficult to verify without more extensive platform data. As Benjamin Guinaudeau, a Université Laval professor and co-author, put it: “Right now, TikTok can say just about anything related to algorithm changes and we can’t verify it.” He added that large, obvious alterations would be detectable from public trends, but subtle shifts to the “For You” recommender are nearly impossible to spot without broader data access.