alt Hacker NewsTikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues
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The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
It's insane right now browsing tiktok and seeing every 3rd or 4th video on my feed have consistent glitches, the only ones mentioning resistance topics from the US. Very black mirror. Feels like it's meant more to send a message that your content is flagged, and to watch what you say and do. Otherwise they would just block it or hide it from your feed.
Allow me to offer some words of wisdom. If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people, you can rest assured that given enough time, those weapons will be used against you. I am watching all this with a mild sense of bemusement.
Anecdotal: uploading a video of original songs with political/protest lyrics will have random background noises added to the audio track, making the songs audio seem amateurish.
Edit: here’s a link to an example https://bsky.app/profile/seaniebyrne.bsky.social/post/3mby7j...
Anecdotal to myself. I shamefully sometimes use TikTok, I particularly like recipe clips and even I noticed something in the last week, most noticeably around this weekend where the algorithm for recommendations changed. It’s like they completely wiped my preferences. I try not to watch anything political so I cannot say much about censorship of content but something was noticeable in the last week.
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 were “unrelated to last week’s news,” TikTok said.
There was a major storm over the weekend. I think the issues have been resolved. Is it still the case anti ICE videos can't be uploaded? Seems easy to test.
Glitch or not, anything that helps get people off TikTok and hopefully off their phones is a good thing.
It looks like some are moving over to upscroll, anyone know anything about upscroll? what other apps are you using?
I remember when everyone migrated from MySpace to Facebook and I assumed everyone was going to just keep moving over to the next big thing every few years but that actually didn't happen. Facebook became an institution.
So this was uploaded only 6 hours ago and has over 1,000 points and is at the very bottom of the front page (#28 right now).
Under the current administration, the US is in the process of throttling long term economic growth, cutting itself off from its traditional allies, and pulling back as a global power. China's Communist Party has the most to gain from the end of American greatness.
Remember all the grievances about the previous executive administration's "Twitter Files" censorship? Rules for thee, but not for me.
To be clear, I think both censorship regimes are not good, but I can't say I'm surprised.
It feels like federated networks with open-sourced feed algorithms are the best path forward.
If AI removes any technical limitations, and automates content management, what's stopping a content creator from owning what they create and distributing it themselves?
How can centralization continue to survive?
Is it a technical glitch that prevents the uploads? Or is it a technical glitch that let's people know that that content is being censored
Do not expect your rights to be honored on large platforms. They are fenced gardens regularly weeded, using algorithms with very specific preferences.
The only information outlet where we can have a reasonable expectation of freedom is the web itself, a good old websites on your own domain. Could be a txt file if you want to keep it simple ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came stays relevant
This is building an interesting case for those that say that the rest of the world can not build successful competitors to US entities: they can, but then they get taken away. I wouldn't use TikTok, but I find the whole situation a bit strange, ostensibly the rest of the world has a capability problem, but then when they are successful that can't left to stand.
The new TOS also says it tracks: immigration status, political affiliation, whether you identify as non-binary or transgender, religion, activist content you consume, etc.
A few weeks ago, I reported a compilation video of ICE officers beating people. The description included the phrase "The deportations will continue :)".
I reported it for promoting violence, but TikTok found no violation of its guidelines.
It probably didn't help that the video was posted by the official White House TikTok account..
It’s crazy to think that Instagram Reels, owned by Meta, is preferable to TikTok now. At least Reels now is at least competitive in terms of content - unlike two years ago when people were worried about TikTok being banned and Reels was not a good alternative.
This was quick, it was never about the money, who needs Truth Social and Twitter when you have tiktok. Best of luck America
I will save this for the future, when people complain about Chinese open models and tell me: But this Chinese LLM doesn't respond to question about Tianmen square.
I'm happy anti-censorship is becoming more popular generally. Tiktok blanket banning terms and aggressive moderation of political topics didn't start here, but if it gets people talking...
for what it's worth many solopreneurs on the X/twitter solopreneur committee were reporting their uploads to TikTok were failing, and I saw at least one conservative complaining that their (conservative political) videos were not uploading to TikTok either
At least within Canada I'm continuing to get anti-ICE content from various creators.
CEOs and boards of directors treat the regular public as either slaves or stupid. I don't know if they believe that or pretend to believe.
I wonder when Americans will wake up and see their system for what it is. It is almost too late to fix it. What comes next is going to change the rest of our lives (everyone, the whole world).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/01/26/tiktok-c...
Upscrolled looks like a promising alternative.
even setting aside the particulars of a US-controlled tik-tok, that our entire view of the world is through these narrow balistraria controlled by a few platforms is extremely detrimental to a free society, especially one so dependent on the flow of information.
You could leave tik-tok but that's where folks are at and the average tik-tok viewer is unlikely to leave their dank maymays just because of some "alleged" (and I use that term lightly) censorship
TikTok easily bends over backwards authoritarian government. In Nepal, during the GenZ protest, TikTok disabled the search for "NepoBabies" which is the term people used for the affluent lifestyle of leaders' children and which was why the GenZ protest happened. Every other social media was banned but not TikTok because they happily censor whatever the government tells them to
How is TikTok able to screen this en masse? Are they going after tags? Political issues aside, I am really interested in the technical background in this.
it's obvious that tiktok is doing this intentionally, pretending it's a technical issue, so that people can blame the US government for forcing the sale of tiktok
it's just retaliation
and obviously, trump will play into this
it seems like our software engineers included `censorship=true` in the latest build when someone filed a JIRA ticket that said "censor stuff"
we're going to class this one as low priority / won't fix.
They are in transition, so for the moment I believe them to have technical problems, because it also matches my experience. Yesterday I encountered problems with several videos, which are working today. And not all of them were political.
Going by the comments, people on TikTok seem very fast in seeing conspiracies, when many problems can be simply explained with normal problems or human failings. And it's good to be critical and aware of dangers, but I fear if they are so easy to call out problems, it will wear of fast, and people will start to ignore real problems again, like they used to be.
They weren't concerned about privacy of US citizens so much as they were about their ability to directly influence the platform.
A riff on "The Revolution Won't Be Televised"...
the revolution won't be televised because the bastards who own the networks won't let you see it and you probably wouldn't watch it anyway— you're too busy with your beer and your phone and your comfortable numbness.
the revolution won't be televised because it's not entertainment, not something you can half-watch while you're scratching your ass and wondering what to eat for dinner.
you can't consume revolution like you consume everything else— passive, bored, already thinking about the next thing.
the revolution won't be televised because it happens in the place you're most afraid to look: inside your own goddamn skull.
it starts when you stop lying to yourself, stop swallowing their garbage, stop pretending this is fine. it's not on TV. it's not coming to save you. it's just you and the choice to keep sleeping or finally wake the hell up. nobody's going to film that.
So it went from being a social manipulation tool of one county to another and ownership changed hands.
Is Instagram better at this? Since their racist content is so unfiltered nowadays, surely they would allow this at least?
So, US has their own Tiananmen Square. How the turntables.
Nuts that the whole company is in on it. Missing such a huge story is something that rank and file engineers would notice. But nobody is saying anything.
Perhaps on the tiktok Blind?
Where is that HN thread where everyone was saying how bad it would be for Biden to ban Tiktok? Let's see how it can be used to manipulate the upcoming elections in the US this year. Except now they can't be banned, they're American!
What's disappointing is that this precise thing was happening during people trying to report on Gaza issues, and were encountering ghost "technical issues" and shadow bannings/outright bannings, but any such discussion about it here seemed to be getting flagged.
Well, besides that TikTok is censoring “Epstein” now. Is that a tech issue as well?
If you can upload any video but ICE brutality then I want to conduct system design session with their architect, tech lead, and CTO!
Anecdotally my feed dramatically shifted. My politics are very leftwing, and prior to the transfer virtually every video was discourse on ICE. Following the transfer, I get content that is all over the place. At one point, I got 8-9 tiktoks in a row of obviously bot-created rightwing text.
At least on the surface level, I could believe this is just a full algorithm reset and they are having problems with it. But even after other algorithm resets that I believe I've experienced, Tiktok figured it out extremely quickly. If this continues, I will believe in the heavyhanded censorship theory.
Dupe of another post that was mysteriously flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
We didn’t go after TikTok because of PRC propaganda. We wanted a platform for US propaganda.
Can't mention "Epstein", either.[1]
It was better when TikTok reported to the Third Department of the People's Liberation Army. They don't censor outside China.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-...
When I was 11, on 17th Nov 1989, in Czechoslovakia, my father was watching the evening news on our (black and white) TV, as usual.
There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"
This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical difficulties..