After a U.S.-led investor group led by Oracle’s Larry Ellison took control of TikTok’s U.S. business, users accused the app of throttling videos about Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and posts related to the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Posts went viral on social media blaming the new owners, the hashtag #TikTokCensorship trended on X, many users downloaded alternatives, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers in the European Union called for probes.
A new analysis in Good Authority, conducted by eight academics, suggests a different explanation. Using view metrics from more than 100,000 videos, the researchers tracked how often TikTok recommended content about ICE, Pretti, Renee Good (a woman killed by an ICE agent), and the keywords “Trump” and “Epstein,” comparing those to nonpolitical posts like food recipes and Oscars coverage. They found that around the time of a TikTok data center outage, views for posts across all these topics “dropped to almost zero.” Total views plunged after the outage and then began to rebound, the team reported.
The findings do not support claims of systemic top-down political censorship based on publicly available data, but the researchers caution that subtle or targeted removals could still have occurred. Small numbers of removed or shadowbanned posts might not show up in overall trends, and private direct messages — where some users said the word “Epstein” was blocked — are not accessible for study.
A persistent challenge is that TikTok does not grant researchers the level of access needed to fully evaluate how its recommender system moderates content: what gets amplified, what is suppressed, and what policies shape those outcomes. “Our position is that TikTok and other platforms should provide a way for third-party researchers to study their recommender systems and look for evidence of undue political influence,” the researchers wrote.
The timing of the outage heightened concern because Ellison is a known ally of President Trump, and observers worry about how the new ownership might reshape the app. Anupam Chander, a law and technology professor at Georgetown, said the new owners “will have to earn the trust of Americans” and could demonstrate neutrality by welcoming researchers and hiring respected liberals.
TikTok’s new U.S. investors include Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Emirati investment company MGX. ByteDance, the Chinese parent, retains a minority stake and still owns the algorithm, which will be retrained with American users’ data. Backers of the U.S. entity say China will not control the algorithm and that Oracle will supervise it, but some observers remain skeptical because the technology itself is not being sold away from Beijing.
A TikTok spokeswoman said no changes have been made to its algorithm since the new investors took over the American business. The ownership deal was made to comply with a federal requirement to distance TikTok from ByteDance on national security grounds.
Benjamin Guinaudeau, a professor at Université Laval and one of the study’s authors, told NPR that TikTok can assert things about algorithm changes but outside observers can’t verify them. He added that large, obvious changes (such as suddenly stopping all political content) would be detectable, but without more extensive data from TikTok it is “nearly impossible to detect subtle changes to their ‘For You’ recommender system (‘the algorithm’).”