For those playing the “is TikTok US censoring content?” game at home, you’ll now be able to get a better idea of such, with TikTok USDS JV (a catchy acronym if ever I’ve seen one) sharing an update on its ongoing systematic challenges, which it says have now been resolved.
As a quick recap, a day after the TikTok US deal was announced, placing the management of TikTok’s American business into the hands of a bunch of U.S. administrators, the app started acting up, suffering from random drop-outs and other service issues, which spooked American users.
What’s more, view counts on some videos weren’t rising, with some videos getting no views at all, while some keyword searches appeared to be returning no results. Users then speculated that these videos and terms may have been censored by the new TikTok USDS regime, and because the TikTok America team was essentially hand-picked by President Trump, some users even deactivated their accounts in response, citing overt censorship from the new management.
But TikTok USDS JV says that this was not the case, explaining last Monday that:
“We're continuing to resolve a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage at one of our U.S. data center partner sites. While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we've been working to resolve together with our data center partner.”
TikTok US explained that this issue may have caused slower load times, timed-out requests, and yes, users may have seen “0” views on their posts, or no earnings in their creator accounts.
These were all symptoms, TikTok says, of its broader technical issues.
Which, apparently, are now resolved:
So, apparently, it was all down to a power outage caused by winter storms, but now all of the TikTok US servers are back up, and everything should be back to normal again.
Which should also mean no censorship, or perceived censorship of certain terms, and no restriction of searches for, say “Epstein” in the app.
We’ll see if those were rumors or not, and we’ll now also get a better idea of how the new TikTok US is going to operate, and how the new American management of the app is going to approach things like converting the algorithm for U.S. audiences.
Because as noted in the TikTok US deal release:
“The [US] Joint Venture will retrain, test, and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data. The content recommendation algorithm will be secured in Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment.”
What exactly that means is unclear, but it does seem like JV TikTok will have some say over what the algorithm amplifies, or doesn’t.
There were also some initial concerns with TikTok’s updated US privacy policy, though as I wrote a few weeks back, the changes implemented are fairly standard, so probably nothing to see here.
Which could be the case for all of this, but now, we can get a better idea of any changes, and what comes next for TikTok in the US.
