Was there censorship on TikTok after the U.S. takeover?
A TikTok outage more likely explains recent anomalies – there’s no evidence of larger platform changes so far.
Credit: Adobe Stock
Authors
- Benjamin Guinaudeau,
- Kylan Rutherford,
- Sol Messing,
- Molly Roberts,
- Andreu Casas,
- Keng-Chi Chang,
- Hennes Barnehl,
- Joshua A. Tucker
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Recently, there have been allegations that TikTok has censored content on the platform after the Jan. 22 restructuring that shifted TikTok to a U.S.-based joint venture. More specifically, people alleged that certain types of content were no longer being accepted for posting on the platform or were receiving less engagement.
We conducted an over-time analysis of posts with particular keywords on TikTok before and after the restructuring. We do not find evidence consistent with these allegations. Although there was a dramatic decrease in volume for posts containing political- and non-political keywords alike, the patterns in our data are consistent with TikTok’s explanation of a broad Jan. 25 outage.
At the same time, we cannot definitively reject the possibility that the new owners changed TikTok’s core recommender system, and there are some important limitations to our analysis.