California’s Newsom accuses TikTok of suppressing Trump criticism
By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON, Jan 26 (Reuters) – California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday accused TikTok of suppressing content critical of President Donald Trump as he launched a review to decide whether its content moderation practices violate state law; The platform cited a system malfunction as the reason.
Newsom’s announcement comes after TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance last week finalized a deal to form a majority-U.S.-owned joint venture that would secure U.S. data to avoid a ban on the short-video app used by more than 200 million Americans.
ByteDance said TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC will secure U.S. user data, applications and algorithms through data privacy and cybersecurity measures, in a deal praised by Trump.
“Following the sale of TikTok to a pro-Trump business group, our office received reports and independently verified examples of suppressed content critical of President Trump,” Newsom’s office said, without going into further detail about X. he said.
“Gavin Newsom is launching an investigation into this conduct and is calling on the California Department of Justice to determine whether this violates California law,” he added.
In response, a TikTok representative noted a previous statement blaming a power outage at the data center, adding: “It would be wrong to report that this is anything other than technical issues, which we have transparently confirmed.”
The joint venture added that users may notice errors, slower loading times or timeout requests when publishing new content due to the impact of the outage.
“While the network was recovering, the outage caused a gradual system failure that we are working to resolve,” said the statement published on X before Newsom’s statements.
Last week’s deal was a turning point for TikTok after years of battles with the U.S. government under Trump and former President Joe Biden over Washington’s concerns about risks to national security and privacy.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Democrat Newsom and Republican Trump have long criticized each other.
Trump, who has more than 16 million followers on his personal TikTok account, stated that the application helped him win the 2024 elections.
The deal sees American and global investors own 80.1% of the startup, with ByteDance owning 19.9%.
Each of the joint venture’s three managing investors, cloud computing giant Oracle, private equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX, will hold a 15% stake.
A White House official said the U.S. and Chinese governments signed the agreement.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Christian Martinez and Clarence Fernandez)
