By Kanishka Singh<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON, Jan 26 (Reuters) – California Governor Gavin Newsom accused TikTok on Monday of suppressing content critical of President Donald Trump as he launched a review to decide \u200bif its content moderation practices violated state law, while the platform cited a systems failure.<\/p>\n
Newsom’s \u200cstatement came after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, last week finalized a deal to set up a majority U.S.-owned joint venture that \u200cwill secure U.S. data, to avert a ban on the short video app used by more than 200 million Americans.<\/p>\n
ByteDance said TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC would secure U.S. user data, apps and algorithms through data privacy and cybersecurity measures, in a deal praised by Trump.<\/p>\n
“Following TikTok’s sale to a Trump-aligned business group, our \u2060office has received reports, and independently \u200cconfirmed instances, of suppressed content critical of President Trump,” Newsom’s office said on X, without elaborating.<\/p>\n
“Gavin Newsom is launching a review of this conduct and is \u200dcalling on the California Department of Justice to determine whether it violates California law,” it added.<\/p>\n
In response, a TikTok representative pointed to a prior statement that blamed a data center power outage, adding, “It would be inaccurate to report that \u200bthis is anything but the technical issues we’ve transparently confirmed.”<\/p>\n
Users may notice bugs, slower load times \u200cor timed-out requests when posting new content due to the impact of the outage, the joint venture added.<\/p>\n
“While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve,” it said in the statement on X posted before Newsom’s remarks.<\/p>\n
Last week’s deal was a milestone for TikTok after years of battles with the U.S. government over Washington’s concerns about risks to national \u2060security and privacy under Trump and former President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n
The \u200bWhite House did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Newsom, \u200ba Democrat, and Trump, a Republican, have long been critical of each other.<\/p>\n
With more than 16 million followers on his personal TikTok account, Trump credited the app with \u200dhelping him win the \u20602024 election.<\/p>\n
The deal provides for American and global investors to hold 80.1% of the venture while ByteDance will own 19.9%.<\/p>\n
Each of the joint venture’s three managing investors, cloud computing giant Oracle, private \u2060equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX, will hold a stake of 15%.<\/p>\n
The U.S. and Chinese governments \u200chad signed off on the deal, a White House official said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh \u200cin Washington; Editing by Christian Martinez and Clarence Fernandez)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Kanishka Singh WASHINGTON, Jan 26 (Reuters) – California Governor Gavin Newsom accused TikTok on Monday of suppressing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,2926,9,8,74772,536,457,55685,74773,3808],"class_list":{"0":"post-151328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-governor","10":"tag-california-headlines","11":"tag-california-news","12":"tag-content-moderation","13":"tag-donald-trump","14":"tag-gavin-newsom","15":"tag-joint-venture","16":"tag-systems-failure","17":"tag-tiktok"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}