The short video platform TikTok just completed a key transaction last week, officially handing over its U.S. operations to a new joint venture "majority-owned by U.S. investors," but operations have not been smooth after the new owner took over. This past weekend,Some TikTok users in the United States were unable to upload videos, and TikTok attributed this to a power failure in a U.S. data center.At the same time, some users discovered thatVideos related to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the shootings in Minneapolis last Saturday were unable to be posted properly, sparking widespread concerns about content censorship on the platform.
Many users said that the videos they uploaded on the above topics were either automatically sent to the "review process" by the system, or the playback volume was far lower than normal levels. Some users received prompts that their posts related to the shooting were marked as "ineligible for recommendation" (Ineligible for Recommendation), while other users had their accounts briefly banned. Under pressure from outside public opinion, TikTok said on Monday evening local time that the company was still working hard to resolve the infrastructure failure. Related issues triggered "cascading system failures" and led to a series of technical errors. Official tips state that users may currently experience abnormal situations such as slow loading, request timeouts, and videos showing 0 views or 0 likes.
Affected by the continuous outages and concerns about "hidden censorship", some TikTok users began to switch to other video social platforms, among which an application called UpScrolled became one of the main beneficiaries. Currently, UpScrolled has entered the top ten free apps in the US App Store, ranking 8th. Earlier in the day, its ranking once reached 2nd. Some analysts believe that if TikTok cannot fix technical problems in time and eliminate users’ concerns about censorship, the trend of user exodus may further intensify.
Meanwhile, TikTok’s latest privacy policy update has also sparked discussion and misunderstanding on social media. The new terms show that TikTok in the United States may collect information such as users’ “citizenship or immigration status” and process it in combination with more precise location information. Many users felt uneasy about this, but reports pointed out that the privacy policy text before this update actually contained similar statements, but it was recently re-examined under the political atmosphere and data sovereignty disputes.
In terms of ownership structure, 80.1% of the newly established TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC (TikTok US Data and Security Joint Venture) is held by U.S. and global investors, including institutions such as Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX from Abu Dhabi. The above three institutions serve as management investors, each holding 15% of the shares. The remaining US investors include Dell Family Office and Susquehanna International Group related entities. TikTok parent company ByteDance retains a 19.9% stake. The new company will be governed by a seven-member, American-majority board of directors, with TikTok’s former global operations chief Adam Presser serving as CEO.
According to the transaction arrangement, the joint venture will be responsible for data protection, content moderation and algorithm security work within the US market. TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is being retrained and adjusted based on U.S. user data and hosted in Oracle’s cloud environment to meet U.S. regulators’ requirements for data localization and security control. However, as outage incidents and content handling disputes continue to ferment, the outside world still has many questions about whether this new governance structure can truly take into account security, space for speech, and technical stability.