California Governor Gavin Newsom is launching an investigation into TikTok. He wants to find out if the app is intentionally silencing users who are critical of President Donald Trump. This probe starts just days after the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, finished a massive deal to hand over its U.S. operations to a new group of investors to avoid a total ban. The trouble began after reports surfaced on social media that users could no longer send private messages containing the word “Epstein.”
Newsom’s team decided to test this themselves. They tried to send a direct message with the word in it and immediately hit a wall. The app gave them a warning saying the message could not be sent because it might violate community guidelines. Beyond that, the Governor’s office says it has independently confirmed several other cases where the app suppressed content that spoke out against the President. Because of these findings, Newsom is calling on the California Department of Justice to see if TikTok is breaking state laws.
This drama is happening right as TikTok undergoes a huge corporate makeover. To satisfy the Trump administration, ByteDance now only owns about 20 percent of the business. A new entity called the TikTok USDS Joint Venture owns the rest. Big players like Oracle, Silver Lake, and the Emirati fund MGX now run the show. This new U.S.-based team has total control over content moderation and is currently retraining the app’s famous recommendation algorithm using only American data.
Since the new owners took over, the app has been acting up. Over the weekend, many users complained that they couldn’t post videos about ICE agents or that their feeds weren’t updating. TikTok denies any intentional censorship regarding these technical glitches. Instead, the company blamed the issues—including slow loading times and failed uploads—on a simple power outage at one of its U.S. data centers. They say they are currently working to restore all services.
