The Conversation (0)
Getty Images
American actor and comedian Megan Stalter is leaving TikTok after claiming anti-Donald Trump and anti-ICE censorship.
Since the US arm of TikTok was taken over from the Chinese company ByteDance, users have been reporting a number of problems, including allegations of political censorship.
In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom said he is launching an investigation into possible censorship after several users reported the word “Epstein” (in relation to the convicted paedophile and Donald Trump’s former friend Jeffrey Epstein) was being prohibited from being sent in TikTok DMs.
In a statement posted to its X account on Monday, the Tiktok USDS Joint Venture said: “Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a US data centre impacting TikTok and other apps we operate. We're working with our data center partner to stabilise our service. We're sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”
They later posted an update on the outage and said they were “continuing to resolve a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage”.
“While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we've been working to resolve together with our data centre partner,” TikTok wrote, adding that users might encounter “multiple bugs, slower load times, or timed-out requests, including when posting new content”.
Due to the changes on the platform, Hacks star Stalter has revealed she is leaving the platform altogether.
In a post on her Instagram, the 35-year-old wrote: “Hi so today I will be downloading my videos and deleting my TikTok page.
“TT is under new ownership and we are being completely censored and monitored. I'm unable to upload anything about [ICE] even after I tried to trick the page by making it look like a comedy video. Let's delete the app love you!”
In a follow-up post, Stalter shared a video running other users, who may be thinking of doing the same thing, through how she downloaded all her content ahead of deleting her account.
“It took me a couple hours to manually save each video but wasn't too hard!” she wrote. ”I've heard that your computer is best for deleting the account but I saved my videos on my computer and then deactivated on my phone. ABOLISH ICE, love you forever Minneapolis.”
The Independent has reached out to representatives for Stalter and TikTok for comment.
Why not read…
- Billie Eilish calls out ‘fellow celebs’ for staying silent on ICE
- ICE agent roasted after bragging about '$200k salary': 'I'd do this for free'
- Gavin Newsom celebrates 'Gestapo Greg' Bovino's 'removal' from Minnesota after deadly
Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter
Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.