The comedian Megan Stalter, who posts absurd character skits to an audience in the high hundreds of thousands across Instagram and TikTok, tried sharing a different kind of video on Saturday night. Driven by the death of Alex Pretti, the nurse shot by a federal immigration agent or agents that day, she had recorded herself urging her fellow Christians to speak out against ICE raids in Minneapolis.
“We have to abolish ICE,” Stalter said in the video. “I truly, truly believe that is exactly what Jesus would do.”
On Instagram, the video was reposted more than 12,000 times. But her plea never made it to TikTok. In a follow-up post on Instagram, she said she had attempted to upload the video to TikTok several times with no success, then had given up and deleted her TikTok account entirely, believing her content was being censored because it was about ICE. (CNN has reached out to Stalter for comment.)
Other users reported the same combination of events, drawing a circumstantial connection between their efforts to make videos about ICE and the difficulties they had posting them over the weekend. The controversy caught the attention of Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, who said that among “threats to democracy,” the purported censorship on TikTok was “at the top of the list.” (CNN has reached out to Murphy’s office for comment.)
TikTok said in a statement that glitches on the app were due to a power outage at a US data center. As a result, a spokesperson for TikTok US Joint Venture told CNN, it’s taking longer for videos to be uploaded and recommended to other users. The tech issues are ongoing, TikTok said, and are “unrelated to last week’s news.”
Last week, a majority American-owned joint venture took control of TikTok’s assets in the US, in a deal shepherded by the Trump administration under a 2024 law requiring the app to move out from under its previous Chinese ownership or face a ban in the United States. Among its new investors is the tech company Oracle, whose executive chair Larry Ellison is a close affiliate of President Donald Trump. Oracle will store US TikTok users’ data in a “secure US cloud environment,” according to TikTok, and the new joint venture will “have decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and content moderation.”
As a private platform, TikTok is free to exert influence on what users can upload or see. Even if accusations of TikTok’s censorship are unprovable, it’s understandable that US users would be increasingly skeptical of the platform in this moment, said Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of technology ethics and internet law at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“There’s not a lot of trust in the leadership of social media platforms in general,” Fiesler told CNN. “And given the connection of the new ownership of TikTok to the Trump administration, which is so wrapped up in what is happening with ICE in Minnesota, it’s not surprising that there’s a significant lack of trust.”
TikTok users are concerned
Fiesler said she was “unsurprised” about censorship concerns on TikTok, given the timing.
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