The Disastrous Rollout of the Trump-Approved TikTok Serves as a Stark Warning for Us All
Big Tech platforms wield far too much power over our information landscape to continue operating without transparency.
Late last month, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, finalized a deal to spin off the platform’s US operations into a new, majority US-owned company.
Within 48 hours of the takeover, users began to experience problems. Many top creators saw their reach plummet and reported that their videos related to controversial topics like criticizing ICE and advocating for Palestine were being throttled by the algorithm. Some US users could not type the word “Epstein” in direct messages. Bisan Owda, an award-winning Gaza-based journalist, reported that her account was banned, prompting outcry.
TikTok said most of these issues were attributable to a data center power outage, and that the Epstein problem was a technical glitch. The company also said that Owda’s account was flagged due to an impersonation issue from last September, which has since been resolved. The account is back up.
Amidst this chaos, however, a clip of Adam Presser, TikTok US’s new CEO, speaking at an event organized by the World Jewish Congress last year, began to spread. He spoke about the platform’s moderation policies, saying, “We made a change to designate the use of the term ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech. So if somebody were to use ‘Zionist,’ of course, you can use it in that sense, you’re a proud Zionist, but if you’re using it in a context degrading someone, calling somebody a Zionist as a dirty name, then that gets designated as hate speech to be moderated against.”
Presser added that in 2024, the platform tripled the number of accounts it banned for “hateful activity.” He also said that over two dozen Jewish organizations “are constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends.” The rules around the term Zionist predate Presser’s role, but the incident shows how a lack of transparency on moderation decisions can lead to widespread distrust and confusion.
And it’s not just TikTok.
On Thursday night, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker was banned for several days for using the phrase “rabid ultra-Zionist pigs“ to describe people defending ICE agents using watchlists to track anti-Israel protesters. Twitch’s Hateful Conduct Policy claims that using the term Zionist “to refer to the political movement in a critical way” is not violative. However, Piker was banned without further explanation, leaving him unable to cover major national news events for days.
Over the past couple of decades, social media has become the primary way that millions of Americans get their news. TikTok is a top news source for one in five Americans, and 43% of adults under 30 regularly get news from TikTok, according to a report from Pew Research Center. Twitch and YouTube serve as de facto cable news networks for millions of Americans, and posts on X regularly drive mainstream media news cycles. Our entire information and media landscape has been reoriented around social media.
But creators and content on social media are uniquely vulnerable to government censorship efforts. While legacy newspapers and television news programs have certain explicit constitutional protections, social media content often falls in a gray zone. Platform moderation decisions can be heavily influenced by the political party in power, and politicians constantly use threats of regulation, lawsuits, hearings, and outright bans to pressure Big Tech to censor lawful speech.
We’ve seen how both political parties have sought to crack down on independent journalism, especially when it challenges power or government-approved narratives.
During the earlier days of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Biden White House officials acknowledged pressuring social media platforms to remove or downrank content deemed “misinformation.” Doctors, scientists, and advocates attempting to warn the public about the dangers of repeated infections with the virus had tweets flagged and their social media accounts permanently suspended.
The same pattern escalated after October 7, when content that criticized Israel’s genocide in Palestine was heavily censored. Videos documenting Israeli war crimes, the murders of Palestinian journalists and thousands of innocent children, or simply criticizing US support of Israel, were often throttled or removed under vague “community guidelines.”
When Donald Trump took office last January, Mark Zuckerberg promised to allow for more free discussion on Meta platforms. However, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Meta’s pro-Palestine content suppression found over 1,050 takedowns and other suppression of content that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters. HRW called Meta’s censorship of pro-Palestinian speech “systemic and global.”
People in power understand that controlling online speech means controlling our entire information and media landscape. TikTok itself was banned by Joe Biden after the platform, while under Chinese ownership, allowed too much pro-Palestinian speech and progressive activism.
When Benjamin Netanyahu met with a group of pro-Israel influencers last year, he reiterated how crucial it was for the US government to wrestle control of TikTok in order to force-feed the public pro-Israel narratives. “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we’re engaged, and the most important ones are the social media, and the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok,” he said. “It’s number 1, and I hope [the deal to sell the platform] goes through, because it can be consequential.”
Trump also regularly pressures social media platforms to regulate speech as he sees fit. He has pushed Big Tech companies to suppress criticism of his administration, demanded preferential treatment for conservative voices, and threatened to revoke Section 230 protections if platforms fail to comply.
None of these social media platforms is committed to protecting free speech and open access to information. The reality is that Big Tech doesn’t need free expression to make billions of dollars in advertising revenue. In fact, a more censorious platform full of only brand-safe speech is infinitely more profitable. Silencing certain forms of expression allows Big Tech companies to curry favor with politicians and keep regulators at bay. There is simply no political or financial incentive for any Big Tech company to protect the speech of marginalized users and independent journalists.
And these attacks on independent journalism and free speech are escalating. The Democrats and Republicans are currently working together to force through the most aggressive and expansive online censorship laws we have seen in our lifetime under the guise of “child safety.” These laws mandate unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and data harvesting, rewarding Big Tech with even more power and money, and giving the government sweeping authority to decide what content is “harmful” and should be removed.
In the United Kingdom, where similar laws have already passed, some of the first content censored under the country’s Online Safety Act was pro-Palestinian speech. A subreddit dedicated to documenting Israeli war crimes was hidden, and social media platforms began classifying vast amounts of breaking news footage, war coverage, investigative journalism, and posts challenging government narratives as “harmful to children“ and restricting them.
This is why we desperately need more decentralized social media and internet platforms that are built for the public good rather than profit. The Fediverse offers one model for how this could look. Instead of a single corporate entity controlling speech, the Fediverse is made up of thousands of independently run servers that interoperate using shared protocols. No one government or company can dictate moderation rules across the entire network, and communities can set their own standards for transparency. Other platforms, such as the app UpScrolled, which was created by a Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian entrepreneur and recently hit number one on the US app store after the TikTok takeover, are being founded on free speech principles.
The disastrous rollout of TikTok’s new US system should serve as a stark warning to everyone. Big Tech platforms wield far too much power over our information landscape to continue operating without transparency. Our government has effectively deputized Big Tech to censor our new media landscape, all while the legacy media amplifies moral panics about misinformation and online harm in order to manufacture consent.
Social media is now the backbone of our information ecosystem, and whoever controls online speech decides what information the public is or is not allowed to know. Free speech is foundational to a functioning democracy, and we simply cannot count on Big Tech companies to protect it.
Taylor Lorenz, author of the Zeteo column, ‘Network Effect,’ is an acclaimed tech and online culture journalist. For more of Taylor’s writing, subscribe to her Substack, User Mag.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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We knew we were being censored but the extent of the censorship is diabolical. I've moved to Upscrolled. I'm very hopeful that the platform will tell OUR stories.
We need open source content algorithms for these platforms, and generally more open source software where government regulation is needed. These platforms need to be regulated to death.