Don’t Say Epstein!

Last week, around 170 million Americans opened Tik Tok on their phones to find that the usual stream of teenagers explaining how to flip real estate and influencers promoting the health benefits of sunlight charged water had been replaced by a digital speed bump. A pop-up message informed users that if they wanted to keep scrolling, they had to agree to new terms of service and an updated privacy policy. The average user probably clicked the accept button and kept going. For the platform, it marked the official transition to a new corporate identity known as the Tik Tok USDS joint venture LLC.

Users reported that the digital atmosphere changed almost immediately. Within hours, reports began to surface that the platform had developed a sudden sensitivity to certain terms. Users were suddenly unable to send the word Epstein in direct messages. A quirk confirmed by reporters at CNBC and NPR who encountered an error message stating that the text was blocked to protect our community.

This will have made that morning particularly tough for the 13,000 Americans with that surname. While Tik Tok later characterized this as a technical glitch in its safety systems, the timing struck many as a rather surprising coincidence. The apparent censorship wasn't just limited to historical scandals. In Minneapolis, the fatal shooting of protesters by federal agents had ignited a wave of protests around the country and a parallel wave of what felt like suppression on the app.

High-profile creators reported that videos documenting the ICE raids were being shadowbanned or failing to upload altogether. The comedian Megan Stalter told the rap that while one of her posts on Ice Raids had thrived on other platforms, it remained invisible on Tik Tok, leading her to delete her account in protest. In a viral Twitter post, the freelance journalist David Levid shared a screenshot that his political videos were being flagged as ineligible for recommendation, resulting in view counts that sat stubbornly at zero, almost as bad as the box office performance of the new Melania film. By the end of the weekend, the hashtag Tik Tok censorship was trending across rival social media platforms as users attempted to document what felt like a coordinated purge of critical discourse, even prompting California regulators to question whether the platform was violating state laws by suppressing content critical of the current administration.

As the first few days of ...