U.S. TikTok servers went down for roughly 12 hours over the weekend, starting on the night of January 18. American users are now reporting a spike in censorship of political commentary and criticism since the app has been back up and running in the States,

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok’s CEO Shou ZI Chew both attended the inauguration, alongside former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the first tech boss to hitch his wagon to Trump.

A number of social-media posts claim that the Chinese-owned app is blocking content that is critical of the new president.

Users looking for a TikTok alternative learn about daily life in China, but some posts are taboo.

Chew is right that TikTok being banned is due to arbitrary censorship and that this law is an affront to the First Amendment rights of its 170 million users in the United States. But praising Trump’s action is more akin to performance art than traditional lobbying.

A ban would be a nightmare for civil liberties. But TikTok, like all Big Tech platforms, is no friend to the left.

China’s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing.

As self-described " TikTok refugees" pour onto the Chinese social media app RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, some foreign netizens are already running up against the country's extensive censorship apparatus. Newsweek reached out to Xiaohongshu with a request for comment via a general contact email address.

The app had more than 170 million monthly users in the U.S. The black-out is the result of a law forcing the service offline unless it sheds its ties to ByteDance, its China-based parent company.

As for Apple’s unprecedented action, this was spotted by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in a post on X, who pointed out that Apple issued a support document about TikTok, titled “About availability of TikTok and ByteDance Ltd. Apps in the United States.”

The president’s executive order comes after Trump and his supporters have accused the federal government of pressuring social media companies to take down lawful posts over concerns around