California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he will review whether the short-video platform TikTok uses content censorship to suppress comments critical of U.S. President Donald Trump, and whether the related practices violate California law. "It's time for an investigation," Newsom said in a post on the social platform X on Monday night.
The review was launched against the backdrop of broader accusations: TikTok is marking content critical of the Trump administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for review, or reducing its dissemination through methods such as throttling. Just days ago, TikTok avoided a total ban in the United States by completing a White House-backed deal that gave Trump allies significant influence in TikTok's U.S. operations by establishing a U.S. subsidiary governed by a majority U.S. board of directors.
Newsom's office said in a separate X post that the governor decided to launch the review process after receiving reports and "independent confirmation" of suppression of content critical of Trump. The post said Newsom is urging the California Department of Justice to evaluate whether TikTok’s practices violate California law.
Newsom's office told the media that one of their "independent confirmations" was to send private messages containing the word "Epstein" through TikTok to refer to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sex trafficking. It is said that the message was subsequently blocked by the system, and the platform prompted that the message was not sent because it may violate community guidelines.
Faced with doubts from the outside world, TikTok posted a post on the official X account of its new U.S. joint venture entity, blaming recent platform problems on a "major infrastructure failure" in a data center room in the United States. The post stated that although the related power failure has been repaired, it triggered a series of system failures, causing users to experience slow page loading, request timeouts, and abnormal interactions (such as videos showing zero likes). Neither TikTok nor the White House have publicly responded to Newsom's censorship announcement as of the time of reporting.
California Department of Justice spokesperson Elisa Perez said in a statement to the media that the state attorney general's office "cannot comment on any potential or ongoing investigation or even confirm or deny its existence." She also emphasized that the right to freedom of speech is "the cornerstone of the democratic system."
TikTok just completed a deal for about $14 billion a week ago to establish a new subsidiary in the United States. In this deal, Oracle co-founder and Trump ally Larry Ellison became a key figure under the new structure, and Oracle was an important investor in the new entity. Some technology observers have speculated that TikTok may see the proliferation of more pro-Trump content like Elon Musk’s X in the future.
However, after the deal was completed, what really sparked controversy was the issue of content review. On Monday, multiple users reported that TikTok was suppressing content related to the ICE protests in Minneapolis and the shooting death of 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse Alex Pretty by federal agents.
Some celebrities and Democratic politicians have expressed similar concerns. California State Senator Scott Weiner said on X that a video he posted that morning criticizing ICE and referencing the Minneapolis shootings had zero views. He told the media that he has nearly 50,000 fans on TikTok and has never had "zero interaction" on his videos, and bluntly stated that "Obviously, TikTok is suppressing criticism of ICE." When asked about Weiner's video, a TikTok spokesperson pointed again to previous statements about a data center outage that caused a system failure.
Weiner subsequently deleted the original video and re-uploaded a version that afternoon, replacing all references to ICE with ice cube emojis to "test" whether the platform had targeted traffic restrictions. As of Monday evening, his re-upload had received about 300 views. Weiner said he believed the timing of TikTok's problems and the new deal was no coincidence and accused Trump of "wanting to control everything" and even used the term "kleptocracy" to describe the current situation.
Amid the furore, California's censorship of TikTok is seen as an important test of the intersection of content moderation and political power on social media platforms. As Trump returns to the White House and exerts influence on the TikTok deal, concerns about whether the app will invisibly tilt toward Trump and weaken critical voices are rising rapidly, and California's findings may become an important reference in national regulatory discussions in the coming months.