• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

In its first few days under new ownership, the U.S. version of popular video-sharing platform TikTok has faced widespread outages -- as well as backlash from users, celebrities and politicians and rising interest in an alternative open-sourced video app and potential rival called Skylight Social.

On Thursday, TikTok announced that it had closed a deal to transition its U.S. business to TikTik USDS Joint Venture LLC, a consortium of investors which includes U.S.-based tech company Oracle, a tech company run by Larry Ellison, a Republican donor and close ally to President Donald Trump.

According to TikTok’s statement, the new, U.S.-based version of TikTok will operate under “defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for U.S. users.”

However, criticism has erupted over alleged censorship concerns on the new U.S. TikTok, with creators like singer-songwriter Billie Eilish claiming that “TikTok is silencing people” with regard to unprecedentedly low views on videos that would typically succeed on the platform. 

This includes Eilish’s brother Finneas O’Connell’s recent video criticizing the killing of protester Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, which received a low "like" count, although Finneas has 4 million followers. 

On Sunday, Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at Georgetown University, stated on Bluesky that a video he made addressing ICE officers going into peoples’ homes without warrants had been “under review” on TikTok for hours. Once it was uploaded, the video received under 30 "likes," although Vladeck has 13,000 followers.

Megan Stalter, an actress known for her work on “Hacks” as well as her TikTok video presence, posted that she “tried for hours to upload the same video and it wouldn’t show it to one person.” Stalter added that she will delete her TikTok account permanently.

These concerns have reached the government level as well, with Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) recently posting about TikTok’s alleged suppression of a user’s criticism of ICE raids. “I know it’s hard to track all the threats to democracy out there right now, but this is at the top of the list,” Murphy wrote on X. 

Over the weekend, TikTok made minor updates to its privacy policies, including asking users' permission to collect more precise location data, the ability to track user interactions with AI tools in the app, and the utilization of users’ in-app data to send off-app ads. This change, too, has spooked longtime users. 

A White House spokesperson said in a statement that the “White House is not involved in, nor has it made requests related to, TikTok’s content moderation.”

Beyond content moderation concerns, the TikTok app was also down for thousands of users following new ownership. On Sunday, TikTok users in the U.S. had trouble posting videos, were unable to track their follower count changes, and some video uploads showed no views, according to app tracker Downdetector. 

On Monday, TikTok posted on X that it has “been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate.” 

Shortly after the deal was closed on Thursday, an alternative TikTok app also gained traction. 

Skylight Social CEO Tori White announced that the vertical video-sharing app had added 20,000 new users, helping the platform hit almost 95,000 monthly active users this past month. Overall, Skylight has surpassed 380,000 total users, with 150,000 video uploads.

Skylight Social co-founder and CTO Reed Harmeyer added that users played 1.4 million videos the day the TikTok deal closure was announced, marking a 3x boost in watch time over the previous 24 hours.

Over the weekend, the Mark Cuban backed open-source platform also experienced a 50% increase in returning users as well as a 40% rise in video played on average, and an 100% increase in posts.