TikTok maintains that rules haven’t changed under President Trump

Yesterday, as Donald Trump was being inaugurated, users on other social media sites like Twitter/X claimed that TikTok was blocking searches for terms like “fascism” and “Donald Trump rigged election.” While this writer was unable to confirm the first one, it’s true that the second one is missing in the U.S. as of this writing. Though a spokesperson for TikTok was unable to give a precise reason as to why this wasn’t showing up, they did maintain in no uncertain terms that their rules for posting had not changed since Trump saved the app on Sunday. 

It’s been a big few days for TikTok, with the app briefly going dark over the weekend before Trump indicated that he would not ban the app once he took office. In a conversation with The A.V. Club, a spokesperson for the app pointed to the brief outage over the weekend as a potential reason for missing terms, and said that the company was working to restore U.S. operations to normal. Other posts that were aggregated by Newsweek were critical of Trump and purportedly faced errors; TikTok tells us that there are a variety of reasons why posts can be flagged but maintained again that some temporary instability is to be expected as service is restored. 

There is, of course, good reason to be on guard against the social media giants’ increasingly open alignment with Trump. TikTok’s interface thanked him personally when service was restored in the States on Sunday, and the heads of Twitter/X were spotted with him throughout inauguration weekend. (One of the former performed what sure looked a lot like a Nazi salute during the proceedings yesterday.) Meta also found itself in hot water as search terms like “Democrat” were blocked on Instagram, according to the BBC. When reached for comment, that company maintained it was not just Democrats but other hashtags that were experiencing issues, and that they were working on fixing it.