California Governor Gavin Newsom accused TikTok on Monday of suppressing content critical of President Donald Trump, as he announced a review into whether the platform’s content moderation practices may have breached California law. TikTok, however, said the issue stemmed from a technical failure rather than deliberate action.
Newsom’s comments followed a deal finalised last week by TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance. The agreement created a majority U.S. owned joint venture designed to secure American user data and avoid a nationwide ban of the video sharing app, which is used by more than 200 million people in the United States.
ByteDance said the new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, would protect U.S. user data, applications and algorithms through enhanced privacy and cybersecurity measures. President Trump praised the arrangement.
According to a statement posted by Newsom’s office on X, officials had received reports and independently confirmed cases of content critical of Trump being suppressed following TikTok’s sale to what the governor described as a Trump aligned business group. The statement did not provide specific examples.
Newsom’s office said he had launched a review and called on the California Department of Justice to determine whether TikTok’s conduct violated state law.
TikTok cites technical failure
TikTok rejected the allegation, pointing to an earlier explanation that blamed a data centre power outage. A company representative said it would be inaccurate to describe the issue as anything other than the technical problems the platform had already confirmed.
The joint venture said users might experience bugs, slower loading times or timed out requests when posting content due to the outage. Although the network had been restored, the company said the incident caused a cascading systems failure that engineers were still addressing.
The statement explaining the outage was posted on X before Newsom’s remarks were released.
A deal shaped by years of scrutiny
Last week’s agreement marked a turning point for TikTok after years of disputes with the U.S. government. Both Trump and former President Joe Biden raised concerns over national security and data privacy linked to Chinese ownership of the app.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Newsom’s allegations.
Newsom, a Democrat, and Trump, a Republican, have frequently clashed in public. Trump, who has more than 16 million followers on TikTok, has credited the platform with helping him win the 2024 election.
Ownership structure of the venture
Under the deal, American and global investors will control 80.1% of the new venture, while ByteDance will retain a 19.9% stake. Each of the three managing investors will hold 15%.
These include cloud computing company Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi based investment group MGX.
A White House official said both the U.S. and Chinese governments had signed off on the arrangement.
with inputs from Reuters
