Unveiling TikTok’s Alleged Anti-Trump Censorship – What Users Need to Know

Following TikTok’s ban and the subsequent resumption of service in the United States, users are now raising concerns that the return of TikTok could be one laced with a conspiracy to undertake targeted political censorship. TikTok users in the US have reported that they are seeing anti-Trump censorship on the popular social media app. Let’s look at these concerns, coming shortly after the TikTok app was restored in the US.

Why Did TikTok Get Banned Early?

Following a Supreme Court decision upholding the ban of the popular TikTok app on the basis of national security concerns, the platform’s parent company, Chinese tech juggernaut ByteDance, decided to shut down the app earlier than the set 20th January 2025 deadline.

The US government had given ByteDance an ultimatum: sell the platform’s US operations to an American company/owner by the 20th of January, or the app would be legally banned from operating in the US.

Two days before the ban would take effect, however, and after the Supreme Court ruling that struck down a push to prevent the ban, ByteDance defaced the app and effectively shut it down for its US users. The company, however, expressed optimism that recently elected US President, Donald Trump, would help them get the platform unbanned.

Related: TikTok ‘Goes Dark’: TikTok App Taken Down in the US, Plus How to Regain Access

Why Did TikTok Get Unbanned?

A short while before the day of his inauguration as the 47th President of the United States, then President-elect Trump shared that he would find a solution and vowed to extend the ultimatum for the sale of TikTok for 90 days. Following Trump’s remarks, ByteDance announced that it was working to restore TikTok, just a day after it had been taken down.

@tiktokOur response to the Supreme Court decision.♬ original sound – TikTok

Trump was then inaugurated on the 20th, and through an executive order, gave ByteDance another 75 days to sell off TikTok. The TikTok app was then fully restored in the US, much to the delight of the 170 million American users who flock to the app daily for entertainment. TikTok is so popular in the US that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, offered to pay TikTok’s creators $50,000 per month to post exclusively on Instagram Reels.

Related: Facebook Wants to Pay You $50,000 a Month to Quit TikTok

What’s Different with the Restored TikTok App: Is TikTok Censoring Anti-Trump Posts?

About a day after the app’s restoration, several US users started to sound the alarm about a worrying bug: the app’s search function was not showing results for specific Trump-related content, especially content relating to ‘the Big Lie’: Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was rigged.

What is the Restored TikTok Censoring?

Users in the US pointed out that when they used TikTok’s in-app search to look up phrases like ‘Trump rigged election’ or ‘election rigging’, the terms were returning no results. Meanwhile, users in other countries, such as the UK, were getting results for the same exact search terms.

A user conducted this experiment and shared that they were also experiencing the same, with other social media users in other countries looking up the Trump-related search terms, and getting results. Their conclusion: the restored TikTok app is likely censoring and suppressing anti-Trump content and content that paints Trump in a negative light.

The American TikTok users further shared that on restoring TikTok, the app shared a message thanking Trump for his intervention; thus ByteDance has a straight-forward motive to further Trump’s political agenda.

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Is Anti-Trump Censorship on TikTok a Technical Bug or an Intended Ploy?

In reporting by The Street, they report that yes, it is likely that the phenomenon could just be a technical bug, but going by TikTok’s shady content moderation record, it is possible that the censorship is happening intentionally.

Related: Censorship in the 21st Century and how Authoritarian Governments are Propagating It

What Next if TikTok is Censoring US users?

If TikTok is indeed engaged in a conspiracy to further Trump’s political agenda and censor dissent, then it is clearly a sign of an even bigger problem at ByteDance; and in my opinion, why they were being banned in the US in the first place.

Doesn’t clear censorship in support of Trump actually show that ByteDance is willing to appease any government it supports, or that supports it, by breaking their users’ trust?

If it was China that had asked TikTok to suppress certain political search terms or political content, doesn’t these complaints show that ByteDance would follow through?

Doesn’t these complaints show that ByteDance’s continual ownership of the US TikTok app indeed poses a risk to national security, as the US Supreme Court concluded? Yeah. I thought so.

Related: How Safe Are Your Secrets on TikTok? Examining the Connection between ByteDance, China, Social Media, and U.S. National Security

Has TikTok US Been Sold Off to an American Entity?

There has also been some chatter on social media that these emergent instances of censorship are a sign that TikTok has already been sold off to an American entity. There is still no indication, however, that ByteDance has divested from the app’s US operation.

Stay tuned for the latest tech news and follow our TikTok Ban in the United States 2025 series for more on TikTok.