TikTok’s Early Outage Heightens Censorship and Monetization Concerns: ‘It’s Terrifying’

TikTok’s new ownership is off to a rough start. 

After six years of executive orders and legal battles about whether or not TikTok will be able to exist in the U.S., chaos defined the platform’s first weekend under its new owners as users found themselves unable to post videos and see view counts.

The widespread disruption on Sunday came on the heels of a federal Border Patrol agent in Minnesota killing intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti, sparking the latest political firestorm among creators rallying against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state. But as users found themselves unable to speak out on the social media platform, the outage led to a wave of public departures and accusations that the app was censoring political content, even as the company blamed a power issue with one of its partner data center sites.

“We are being completely censored and monitored,” “Hacks” star and creator Megan Stalter posted on Instagram after saying she would be leaving TikTok. “I’m unable to upload anything about [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] even after I tried to trick the page by making it look like a comedy video.” 

Musicians and siblings Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell made similar accusations, as did social-focused news outlets like The Tennessee Holler. California Gov. Gavin Newsom even called for a formal investigation into the matter, saying Monday evening that he will launch a review into the app and its alleged censoring of “Trump-critical content.”

Multiple users complained about not seeing content from their favorite accounts, while creators said it took TikTok an unusually long time to post their videos and, when they did post, resulted in fewer viewers than usual — and thus less revenue. The number of Americans uninstalling the app also increased more than 130% from Jan. 22 to Jan. 26 compared to daily averages, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. However, those uninstalls have not led to a significant drop in usage.

The outages over this past weekend — and the quick accusations of censorship — highlight the uncertainty many creators and users feel about TikTok changing hands to a new, U.S.-backed joint venture of companies that have links to President Donald Trump. Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX signed a deal on Thursday that gave each of the three companies a 15% stake in the new venture while allowing TikTok to still operate in the U.S. ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of the app, will continue to hold just under 20% of the American platform. 

It also highlights how fragile the shortform creator ecosystem is, especially during a time creators are already frustrated with heavy-handed AI moderation and have more platform options than ever thanks to YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and even UpScrolled, an upstart company getting buzz among dissatisfied shortform users. The rocky start to this U.S. chapter of TikTok is sure to only intensify creators’ mounting concerns. 

Not everyone was so quick to assume the worst out of TikTok. Joey Contino, a journalist and creator with 946,000 TikTok followers, told TheWrap he doesn’t believe there’s a correlation between the Trump administration’s fatal immigration tactics in Minneapolis and TikTok’s disruption — but it still highlights faults in the system.

“TikTok going down the past two days has really emphasized to other creators that, in a moment’s notice, your entire world that you’ve built could disappear overnight. It’s terrifying,” Contino said. “At this moment, every creator is now pushing all of their followers to every platform, because we don’t know which one’s going to be the next one that goes down.”

Representatives for TikTok did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment. An X account for the joint venture posted on Monday that a “major infrastructure issue” at a U.S. data center caused the widely reported hiccups, though the company did not clarify whether they were due to planned maintenance or the nationwide winter storms. This issue led to bugs, slower load times and creators potentially seeing 0 views on new content. Another update reassured users that users’ “actual data and engagement are safe.”

Regardless of the company’s explanation, the disruption has spooked creators. 

“Anyone on TikTok has seen, over the past 36 hours, the entire platform is not really working the way it used to,” Aaron Parnas, a journalist and news-focused creator with over 4.8 million TikTok followers, told TheWrap. 

@aaronparnas1

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♬ original sound – Aaron Parnas

Outages over the weekend

TikTok’s problems started on Sunday when creators noticed posting delays and users reported seeing older content flooding their feeds. Those issues continued into Monday. 

“All day yesterday, my videos would either not post or, when they did post, it would be stuck under review for what seems to be like eight to 12 hours,” Parnas said.

When those videos were eventually cleared from review, they would range from zero to under 1,000 views — figures that are well below the tens to hundreds of thousands of views Parnas’ videos typically receive. Because of those greatly decreased view counts, video monetization also diminished. 

“I honestly don’t know what’s happening. The platform just isn’t working,” Parnas said.

The disruptions began on Sunday around 3:30 a.m. ET, according to Down Detector. Over a 24-hour period, over 585,000 reports were submitted to Down Detector with the primary complaint being that timelines weren’t refreshing.

@joeycontino2

TikTok outage Explained

♬ original sound – Joey Contino

Censorship or an over-reliance on AI?

Sol Messing, a Minnesota-based research associate professor at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, believes the data center outage was perhaps spurred by Winter Storm Fern. But, Messing added, users weren’t wrong to separate the outage from their skepticism over the takeover by the Larry Ellison-backed joint venture. Ellison, an Oracle co-founder, has forged a friendship with President Trump, and backed son David Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount and hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

“It’s impossible to ignore the relationship between the current owner, the current [joint venture] and the administration.” Messing said. “And the administration’s goals at the moment certainly do seem to be to minimize the fallout from these terrible events that happened here in Minneapolis.”

Creators have also noted seeing more videos labelled as “ineligible for recommendation.” However, that particular warning has been pervasive lately. When he spoke to TheWrap, Cotino said six of his videos had the warning, which he believed was connected to TikTok replacing human moderation teams with AI. In August, the platform laid off hundreds of moderators in the U.K. 

“That AI gets things wrong a lot,” Contino said.

One example is a recent video he posted about ICE that was flagged for discussing gun violence. The video was later restored  online but only after Contino was able to get it in front of a human member of the TikTok moderation team who understood that its content was acceptable in context. Last year, 85% of the content TikTok removed for violating its community guidelines was identified and taken down by automation. The AI-driven censorship has gotten so severe that it cost TikTok one of its biggest news-focused creators. 

On Jan. 5, Dylan Page, aka News Daddy (18 million TikTok followers), announced he was leaving the platform due to excessive AI moderation and dimming monetization prospects. Page released a scathing YouTube video that shows five of his videos were either taken off the platform or deemed ineligible for recommendation. That video also showed that his TikTok RPM (Reward Per Mille) dropped to £0.01, the lowest possible for a creator making money on TikTok. 

“The censorship on this platform is getting out of hand,” Page said of his decision. “It’s starting to feel like you can breathe wrong on this platform and your content can be removed.”

Fears of corporate censorship on TikTok have been ongoing for months as the Trump administration hammered out a deal with ByteDance, internet culture reporter Taylor Lorenz told TheWrap. Now that they were in place, she said, “I’m sure it’ll be worse.”

“The thing is, and it’s not unique to TikTok, all of these platforms … will essentially moderate their platforms in a way that guarantees them the least amount of regulatory oversight and makes it sort of most friendly to whatever government they’re operating in,” Lorenz said.

She acknowledged that some people, including herself, may pivot to platforms like UpScrolled in the near future to abate their fears of censorship, though the shift may not last forever. 

Sensor Tower found that U.S. app downloads for UpScrolled increased more than 10 times from Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 (decentralized shortform competitor Skylight Social also saw a 919% lift, and Rednote saw a 53% lift). 

A growing trend among shortform creators

Page isn’t the only news creator who’s seen decreasing RPMs in recent months. TikTok’s creator monetization structure sorts news-focused creators into its “other” category, an option that is on the lower side of monetization. 

“News creators are seeing their RPMs at levels so low that we’ve never seen before,” Contino said. “About a year ago, it was a different ball game. Political content was the biggest thing. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that there were super PACs paying money to do ads on social media.”

But it’s not just a news-focused shift. This past weekend, Parnas saw viewership declines for creators across all categories, including sports and fashion-focused creators. After Page posted that he had been seeing less money from his TikTok posts in recent months, several other major creators like Haley Kalil, Jack Bean and Tevin Musara posted on his videos, noting they had seen the same thing. 

“The platform is breaking in real time,” Parnas said. To combat this, platform diversification has become vital. Both Parnas and Contino post on Instagram, YouTube and Substack in addition to TikTok with Contino also posting on Facebook. 

“There came a point where I was no longer generating really any income on TikTok,” Parnas said. “This happened like six to seven months ago. The Creator Fund just dropped any money I was getting.”

Neither creator expressed any interest in leaving TikTok. But there was frustration about how the platform handled these outages. 

“I don’t know why TikTok hasn’t been more vocal,” Contino said, pointing to the lone Mashable and The Verge articles addressing these disruptions. Those brief articles are a far cry from the public openness with which TikTok used to operate.

“If they want to be the platform for the people, they need to be in front of this.”

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