A funny thing happened on TikTok last month, and its brought allegations of censorship, manipulation, and control.
It was the week of January 22, and after a long legal battle, TikTok had finally—for the first time in its company history—moved its ownership to new, American stewards. But with the American restructuring, TikTok users immediately reported that something had changed: videos would sometimes fail to record any views, and even direct messages would fail to send. But, according to user complaints, the flaws weren’t random. Instead, they befell users who spoke openly about topics that have become political lightning rods in the US, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the actions of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
To some aggrieved users, the flaws looked like censorship. But, according to TikTok, the error messages and missing video count tallies were part of a larger power outage.
“Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a US data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate,” TikTok wrote on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). “We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”
While TikTok has reportedly more than 200 million users in the US alone, it’s far from a universal app. But the changes made to TikTok hint at a bigger sea change in social media and the internet today, in which online spaces are increasingly being altered, shut down, or even controlled—if not through government plot then certainly through corporate influence.
Oddly, the ownership change of TikTok was supposed to solve many of these problems.
Since TikTok’s 2017 founding in China, American lawmakers and government officials claimed that American users were vulnerable to Chinese surveillance. All the data that Americans hand over when using TikTok—their names and email addresses, but also their viewing habits, interests, behaviors, political inclinations, and approximate locations—all of that, the argument went, should not belong in the hands of a foreign power.
As FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2022, the risk of TikTok was:
“The possibility that the Chinese government could use [TikTok] to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations.”
But the rocky start to the new American TikTok has only drawn renewed scrutiny: Have the past concerns about foreign manipulation now become current concerns about domestic manipulation?
Today on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Zach Hinkle, senior social media manager for Malwarebytes, and MinJi Pae, social media content creator for Malwarebytes, about what they personally experienced during TikTok’s transition to American owners, why the changes matter for the delivery of news and information, and how the internet appears to be shrinking from its earlier promises.
As Hinkle said on the podcast:
“ The idea of the internet being a private, free space that was ingrained in its creation, and every platform since then sort of carried that spirit with it… those spaces are disappearing.”
Tune in today.
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For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.
Show notes and credits:
Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)
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