Summary
TikTok users reported that searches for anti-Trump content, such as “Donald Trump rigged election,” returned “No results found” messages in the U.S., while the same searches worked abroad.
Users demonstrated via VPNs that the restrictions seem specific to U.S. accounts, sparking accusations of censorship and claims TikTok is becoming “Trump’s propaganda arm.”
Some anti-Trump hashtags also appear blocked, while pro-Trump terms remain visible.
TikTok has not commented on the issue, fueling further concerns about free speech and potential political influence over the platform.
Whitehouse.gov was scrubbed yesterday too. I tried to search Biden’s protections on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and got the 404 not found error and redirected “home” to a video of the helicopter landing and Trump getting out on the Whitehouse lawn.
Pathetic.
Gosh, imagine that.
If a full Apple modal dialog screen thanking Trump pre-emptively isn’t enough to convince you TikTok is bootlicking, I don’t know what to tell you.
Something that occurred to me this morning is that its a bit worse than just them sucking up to Trump with that to get unbanned; to my understanding, he’s just stated he wont enforce the ban law, so if he was to change his mind, he wouldnt need congress to pass another I dont think? He’d just need to start enforcing the existing one. That means that TikTok has a strong incentive to continue sucking up to him throughout his whole term, to stay on his good side. But it goes further, because it also creates an incentive for other corporate social medias that compete with TikTok to do the same (though admittedly, their owners seem to want to anyway), in the hopes that they can convince him to enforce the ban again and remove some of their competition.
Yep, he’s got all the big social networks under his control now, basically. Tie that to the cowardice of the mainstream media, and he’s got an opportunity to manufacture consent on pretty much anything he wants. And Democrats helped him do it because they didn’t want to be criticised over Gaza on tiktok.
TikTok is not bootlicking. They’re manipulating him.
That’s not how you spell “kowtowing”
TikTok is allegedly collecting data on Americans that Congress has collectively deemed a security threat. That being a main objective, giving Trump a few things in return (promoting him in the app dialog, censorship in his favor) is so that they can continue to do what they do.
Trump is easily manipulated by strongmen like Putin and Xi.
Manipulation, to me, implies either a lack of awareness or agency.
Trump knows exactly what’s going on. He has agency. This is not Xi manipulating Trump, this is Trump’s cognizant, free choice. He chose to ignore congress, ignore law and allow TikTok because it’s pro Trump, it’s that simple.
I’m sure the Chinese govt approves of all this and TikTok has an interest in staying alive, but no one is tricking Trump into this. He is doing this.
That’s a fair point. I guess I think of kowtowing like Tim Cook, who is really anything but MAGA, donating to the inauguration fund.
Everywhere except Bluesky seems to be.
Mastodon? Lemmy? Etc.
This is going to be an era where people will have to move around on social media. I hope some decent alternative can happen for people to dip out.
Maybe people can give up social media. I won’t hold my breath though. People are fuckin addicted.
Yeah I hate those guys. Leaving comments to each other and shit.
closes lemmy and puts my phone away just to reopen it a minute later
Let’s go back to fark
Fark > Digg > Reddit > Lemmy….
Some kid literally burned down the office of his local representative because of a 14-hour unavailability of TikTok. If that is not cold turkey brain damage then I dunno what else is.
Stop clutching your pearls about that one. Dude is a teenager. We all know teenagers have never done stupid, impetuous things before TikTok… 🙄
Everyone has their vices. I replaced fb with reddit over a decade ago. Never bothered with the rest of sm because it was mostly acquaintances posting boring shit and I had group chats with friends.
Now I’ve replaced 99% of my reddit usage with lemmy / hackernews, and lost half my friends due to the fascist propaganda sphere (anti-vaxer/sjw/trans dumb shit). It’d be really hard to abandon them entirely because I avoid most MSM (due to the overt corporate propaganda / censorship) and curating an rss feed is a-lot more effort. Dropping everything would result in becoming completely ignorant of the world.
Will they actually move? I sincerely doubt it. Getting people to change their social media is impossible if they stake any amount of their identity on its use and, sadly, most users do. Frankly, I’d have a hard time leaving lemmy for that reason. Love this little garbage heap among the endless poison wastes of the modern internet.
RedNote is touted as an alternative.
I guess there are limited options when it is a frying pan you are jumping out of.
Especially if the frying pan, you’re jumping out of, is surrounded by other frying pans, just waiting for you to jump in.
Aren’t we on one?
Except they won’t.
Don’t you think it would’ve happened to Twitter already? And it’s certainly not happening to something “essential” like Facebook, where it’s (for instance) the only place your grandparents are on, or the only place that most people list local used stuff on.
I don’t know about TikTok I guess, but it seems integral to the lives of younger people.
texting and Craigslist exist. these are just excuses they use to stay comfy and not stir the pot with their relatives or friends
My tinfoil hat is definitely in between this and Facebook/instagram doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.
They did
It would have been better for it to just have been banned and be done with it. Move on. Now, we will have the same issue we have with Twitter. People refuse to move on despite how terrible the platform is because they are addicted to it.
If it had been banned, it would have, likely, opened the door for a new social media landscape to take shape. Sure, banning isn’t good, but turning into what it’s becoming is, arguably, worse.
What’s more, now we know it would have been “banned” only because it wasn’t pro Trump.
Twitter is not as addicting as TikTok is. Using Twitter doesn’t form psychological dependence to nearly the scale that TikTok does. This is like comparing a ban against soda versus a ban against cigarettes. If soda is banned then a large number of previous soda-drinkers will just quit drinking soda. If cigarettes are banned, it’s not as likely that cigarette-smokers will suddenly decide to quit as a result. Granted, nicotine is known to be one of the most chemically addicting substances to mankind, but I think the comparison is still appropriate.
It was banned, for a hot minute, and people ran to an even more heavily-censored Chinese service.
It’s like smokers weren’t addicted to nicotine; they specifically wanted cancer.
Why only block them in the US, allowing people outside the US or on VPNs to confirm search results exist for those terms? Why not just block them everywhere?
