California’s governor is putting TikTok’s new U.S. owners under an immediate microscope, ordering a formal review after users alleged their critical posts about President Donald Trump abruptly vanished from feeds or saw their reach collapse. The move tests whether a platform that Trump recently celebrated as “saved” can convince skeptical regulators that its algorithms are not quietly tilting the political playing field.
At stake is more than one app’s reputation. The probe will help define how far a state can go in policing opaque recommendation systems that now shape what hundreds of millions of people see about the president, immigration enforcement and protest movements in real time.
The complaints that triggered Newsom’s move
California Gov. Gavin Newsom did not step in until users had spent days documenting what they described as a sudden chill on videos critical of Trump. Creators who had routinely reached large audiences said clips about Minneapolis ICE protests and federal agents’ actions began drawing unusually low views, while some reported that posts about the president’s handling of immigration and policing appeared to stall in the “For You” feed, a pattern that prompted Newsom’s office to look at whether TikTok was stifling content that criticized the president. California Gov Gavin Newsom framed the issue as a basic question of whether political speech about Trump is being quietly downgraded on one of the country’s most influential platforms.
Users described more than just soft throttling. Some said anti-Trump hashtags stopped populating in search, while others reported that videos about Minneapolis ICE protests and federal agents’ force were removed or flagged without clear explanation, even as pro-Trump clips on similar topics remained visible. Complaints that posts about Trump’s record were drawing sharply lower view counts than normal, including from creators with long track records on the app, helped convince California Gov Gavin Newsom that the pattern was not an isolated glitch and warranted a statewide investigation into alleged suppression of anti-Trump content.
Newsom’s legal and political gambit
By announcing a formal review, California Gov Gavin Newsom is testing how far state law can reach into the black box of a global social media platform. His office has said the probe will examine whether TikTok’s handling of Trump-critical posts violates California consumer protection rules or free expression guarantees, and he has urged the state’s attorney general to determine if any conduct crosses legal lines, a step echoed in calls to “investigate” the platform’s treatment of anti-Trump videos in state-level scrutiny. The governor’s office has also highlighted that the investigation will look at whether users were misled about how their political content would be treated, a potential unfair business practice under California law.
Politically, the move positions Newsom as a high-profile counterweight to a platform that Trump has recently embraced. California Gov Gavin Newsom announced on Monday that he was launching the probe into allegations that TikTok censored content critical of the Presiden, signaling that the state is willing to confront a company now closely associated with the White House. His office underscored that the review is not limited to a single incident, pointing to a pattern of complaints and to its own attempts to send a direct message containing the word “Epstein,” which reportedly triggered a warning and raised fresh questions about whether sensitive political or reputational topics are being quietly filtered, a concern that has been tied to alleged censorship of anti-Trump posts and to a message that mentioned Politico and Epstein.
TikTok’s outage defense and the infrastructure question
TikTok’s new U.S. leadership has pushed back on the censorship narrative, arguing that the timing of the problems is a coincidence tied to a major technical failure. The company has said that a power outage at one of its U.S. data centers triggered a “major infrastructure issue” that left some users unable to sign in, view videos or post new content, and that this disruption, not political bias, explains why certain clips about Trump and Minneapolis ICE protests appeared to stall, a defense that has been relayed in statements about a power outage. Users were told they might notice bugs, slower load times or timed-out requests when posting new content because of the outage, an explanation that the joint venture behind TikTok’s U.S. operations has repeated as criticism has mounted.
California officials are not taking that explanation at face value. While acknowledging that Users may indeed have experienced technical problems, Newsom’s office has stressed that the pattern of suppressed anti-Trump content appears too specific to be written off as random network noise, particularly when creators reported that other topics were performing normally during the same window. A representative for the joint venture has said that the network has been recovering and that engineers are working to stabilize the platform, but the governor’s team has signaled that it will examine whether the outage coincided with any manual or automated changes to how Trump-critical posts were ranked, a question that looms over the probe into suppression of Trump criticism.
New ownership, old trust problems
The controversy is unfolding just days after ByteDance finalized a deal that carved out TikTok’s U.S. operations into a new entity with a Trump-aligned ownership structure. Under that agreement, ByteDance now holds only 19.9 percent of the U.S. platform, a figure that has been touted as proof that control has shifted decisively away from Beijing and toward American investors, a change highlighted in accounts of how ByteDance ended up with 19.9 percent of the new company. Trump has personally celebrated the arrangement, writing on his social platform that he had “saved TikTok” and calling the agreement a “very dramatic, final and beautiful conclusion,” language that underscores how closely the app’s future is now tied to his political brand.
For critics, that alignment makes the censorship allegations especially fraught. California Governor Newsom has accused TikTok of suppressing content critical of Trump at the very moment the president is touting the platform as an “important Voice,” a juxtaposition that deepens concerns that political allies of the White House could have informal leverage over moderation decisions, a fear that has been amplified in reporting that describes Last week’s TikTok deal as a milestone after years of battles with Washington over national security and influence. Trump’s own description of the new structure, shared in a post highlighted in coverage of who now controls TikTok’s U.S. platform, has fueled questions about whether the company can credibly claim neutrality when the president who pushed for the sale is now praising the app as a personal victory, a tension that sits at the heart of the new deal and of California Governor Newsom’s charge that TikTok is suppressing content critical of Trump in a way that revives long-standing worries in Washington about political manipulation.
Creators, celebrities and the broader speech fight
Newsom’s investigation is not driven only by anonymous accounts. High profile figures have stepped forward to say their posts about Trump and immigration enforcement appear to be vanishing into a void, including singer Billie Eilish, who has raised concerns that the platform is blacklisting posts about Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings in Minnesota, a claim that has been cited as Newsom spearheads the investigation. State lawmakers such as Wiener have also reported that posts or messages about Trump and federal enforcement actions behaved strangely on the app, reinforcing the sense among California officials that the problem touches both everyday users and public figures.
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