Europe Asia News

California Governor Gavin Newsom claimed that TikTok is suppressing content critical of President Donald Trump and, despite the platform blaming a system malfunction for the issues, launched an investigation to determine whether its content moderation practices violate state law.

This step came after TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance announced last week that it had finalized an agreement to establish a joint venture with majority U.S. ownership to secure U.S. data, in order to prevent a U.S. ban on the short-video app used by more than 200 million Americans.

In a statement posted on X on Monday, Newsom’s office said, “Following the sale of TikTok to a business group close to Trump, our office received reports of suppression of content critical of President Trump and identified independently verified examples,” without providing details.

“Gavin Newsom is launching an investigation into this behavior and has asked the California Department of Justice to determine whether it violates California law,” the statement added.

In response, a representative of TikTok’s U.S. joint venture, pointing to an earlier statement that blamed a data center power outage, said, “It would be incorrect to report that this is anything other than the technical issues we have transparently confirmed.”

The joint venture also said that as a result of the outage, users may have noticed errors when posting new content, slower loading times, or requests timing out.

In a statement published online before Newsom’s remarks, it said, “Although the network was restored, the outage caused a cascading system failure that we are working to resolve.”