Searches on TikTok for #RiggedElection, #VoterFraud, #StopTheSteal, and #StolenElection in the U.S. had zero results.
President Trump is warming up to TikTok, although it isn’t necessarily mutual: The platform is less receptive to his stolen-election claims — and content about alleged election fraud in general — than other major social-media platforms.
Posts that include the hashtags #RiggedElection, #VoterFraud, #StopTheSteal, or #StolenElection are inaccessible in the U.S. on TikTok but are available on Instagram and Twitter/X, according to a new comparative analysis performed by The Network Contagion Research Institute and the Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience at Rutgers University.
“TikTok’s outright suppression of election-related hashtags underscores its use of double standards in censorship and reveals its unique approach to content moderation, which departs significantly from current industry norms,” reads the report, titled “TikTok’s Selective Censorship: A Comparative Analysis of Election-Related Hashtags Across Platforms,” which was published on Wednesday. “The platform’s apparent bias in managing politically sensitive content raises concerns about its broader implications for democratic discourse and information integrity.”
The researchers did not find a single post on TikTok with the hashtag #RiggedElection, #VoterFraud, #StopTheSteal, or #StolenElection in the United States. Instead, all searches for each hashtag yielded the following message: “No results found. This phrase may be associated with behavior or content that violates our guidelines.”
“While TikTok’s Chinese ownership raises obvious and frequently discussed National Security concerns, we can likely blame its censorship of Trump on the American media and disinformation hysteria,” Allum Bokhari, the managing director of the online-censorship watchdog the Foundation for Freedom Online, told National Review in an email.
In making the case that TikTok bowed to media pressure, Bokhari cited a 2019 New York Times article titled “Welcome to TrumpTok, a Safe Space From Safe Spaces,” which labeled TikTok “the first post-Trump social network.”
A year later, the Times ran an article by Taylor Lorenz, which cited the left-wing watchdog group Media Matters and made the case that “TikTok has struggled to prevent conspiracy theories from spreading across the app.”
“Just as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube outright banned Trump in 2021, it’s not surprising that TikTok took similar censorious measures,” Bokhari said.
TikTok’s “Community Guidelines” on “misinformation” have changed since 2023. TikTok’s policy on “election misinformation” was expanded to prohibit “promoting or providing instruction on illegal participation and electoral interference, including intimidation of voters, election workers, and electoral observers,” as well as “calling for the disruption of a legitimate outcome of an election outside of the legal system, such as through a coup.”
Likewise, TikTok’s “Community Guidelines” on “Civic and Election Integrity” have changed. The policies now state that “We do not allow misinformation or content about civic and electoral processes that may result in voter interference, disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, or lead to off-platform violence.” Previously, the policy stated that content with “unverified claims about the outcome of an election” would be considered “ineligible” for the “For You Feed.” But now, TikTok may apply “warning labels” to content that has been “assessed by our fact-checking partners and cannot be verified as accurate.” The new guidelines are incredibly broad, stating that content may be “ineligible” for the “For You Feed” if it contains “misinformation” that “can hinder the ability of a voter to make an informed decision.”
These guidelines are apparently not platform-wide. The researchers found that a user based in Canada or Romania would be able to search for content with tags about stolen elections and discover user-made content — suggesting that TikTok selectively enforced its guidelines in the United States.
A TikTok spokesman told National Review that hashtags like #RiggedElection and #StopTheSteal have been used to promote election misinformation specifically in the United States, and the platform has restricted search results for such hashtags in the United States for years.
Despite the platform’s search-engine restrictions on hashtags mirroring Trump’s catchphrases about the 2020 election, Trump recently praised TikTok and suggested that it helped him “win” the youth vote — but a majority of 18- to 29-year-olds voted for the Harris-Walz ticket. When asked about the TikTok ban in a press conference on December 16, Trump said the following:
We’ll take a look at TikTok. You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok, because I won youth by 34 points. And there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that. . . . TikTok had an impact.
The researchers noted that TikTok suppresses other political content — although the guidelines and enforcement thereof seem to have changed recently to reflect the shift in power.
Searching the hashtag #FkTrump on TikTok in the United States previously yielded user-generated content. But when the researchers prepared the report, searching for #FkTrump on TikTok in the U.S. resulted in an error message and no user posts. Moreover, Google did not provide an index of that hashtag on TikTok — suggesting that the digital history had been scrubbed. But the researchers found a double-standard: The hashtag #F**kJoeBiden on TikTok resulted in user-generated content, and Google indexed those results.
“This discrepancy suggests that #F**ktrump is being suppressed on TikTok and highlights TikTok’s selective censorship practices and its ability to modulate content visibility in alignment with shifting political climates,” the report states.
However, TikTok now allows results when searching for #F**kTrump, possibly a result of high-profile publications (like Forbes) acknowledging accusations against TikTok for maintaining a pro-Trump bias.
“Our policies and algorithms haven’t changed in the last week, this ‘report’ is another pathetic attempt by NCRI to peddle falsehoods about TikTok,” TikTok spokesman Ben Rathe told National Review.
The researchers found that TikTok has far worse content suppression than Instagram or Twitter/X. On Instagram, there was content moderation but not complete suppression; searches for the hashtags yielded user-generated posts such as political commentary questioning election integrity and humorous content. On Twitter/X, the researchers found “a wide variety of user-generated content” with those hashtags, including posts with personal testimonies, political commentary, and questions about election legitimacy.
“No doubt we should be extremely concerned about the ability of social media platforms to influence the result of elections through content moderation or, more egregiously in the case of TikTok, through content suppression, as the NCRI study demonstrates,” Sergiu Klainerman, a mathematics professor at Princeton University who publicly declared his support for candidate Trump in the 2020 election, wrote to National Review. “Kudos to NCRI for conducting this type of careful comparative study which quantifies the relative degree of bias between different platforms.”
Running Cover for the CCP
The new report contributes to the evidence previously gathered by the NCRI and Rutgers that shows TikTok suppresses speech with respect to content.
In a 2023 study titled “A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb: How TikTok’s Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party’s Geostrategic Objectives,” the NCRI and the Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience at Rutgers University analyzed TikTok hashtag data about Uyghurs, Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South China Sea, the Ukraine-Russia War, Kashmir Independence, and the Israel-Hamas War.
“Whether content is promoted or muted onTikTok appears to depend on whether it is aligned or opposed to the interests of the Chinese Government,” reads the 2023 study.
After the report was published, TikTok hid trend data on all China-sensitive hashtags.
The NCRI and two research centers at Rutgers University expanded upon the 2023 findings and, in 2024, released the report titled “The CCP’s Digital Charm Offensive: How TikTok’s Search Algorithm and Pro-China Influence Networks Indoctrinate GenZ Users in the United States.” The previous 2023 study had not analyzed the specific algorithms employed for speech suppression on TikTok, nor had it compared pro- and anti-CCP content across major social-media platforms.
The 2024 study concluded that TikTok amplifies pro-China and lifestyle content to crowd out material critical of CCP, such as content about China’s human-rights abuses. Moreover, the platform algorithmically suppresses anti-China content, evidenced by the fact that the views-to-likes ratio for anti-China content on TikTok was 87 percent lower than pro-China content — despite receiving twice as many “likes.”
As a result of the moderation policies and algorithms that promote content favorable to China, the platform can heavily influence a user’s perspective on China. The researchers conducted a psychological survey and found that, unlike other platforms analyzed, TikTok usage predicted favorability toward China’s human-rights record; individuals who spent more than three hours a day had a big increase — roughly 50 percent — in pro-China attitudes compared with non-users.
“This suggests that TikTok’s content may contribute to psychological manipulation of users, aligning with the CCP’s strategic objective of shaping favorable perceptions among young audiences,” the 2024 report stated.
TikTok was legally banned in the United States by a law forcing Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the video-sharing platform or find a U.S. buyer before January 19, 2025. The law faced challenges, but the Supreme Court unanimously ruled on January 17 to uphold the law, arguing that it did not violate the First Amendment.
“Speaking with and in favor of a foreign adversary is one thing. Allowing a foreign adversary to spy on Americans is another,” wrote Justice Gorsuch in his concurrence.
Beginning on January 19, TikTok was inaccessible to users in the United States. However, Trump signed an executive order on Inauguration Day that ordered the attorney general to not enforce the ban for 75 days, which would provide his administration with “an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward.” A short time later, users in the United States regained access to the app.
Since then, Trump has suggested that Microsoft has “a lot of interest in TikTok.” In 2020, Microsoft similarly considered buying the platform.
A report by the Foundation for Freedom Online states that Microsoft funded and partnered with a range of initiatives that aimed to control online content. In 2018, Microsoft launched its “Defending Democracy initiative” with a “goal” to counter “disinformation campaigns” and “junk news.”
“Records now show that many of the same government officials who spearheaded the most pernicious censorship initiatives between 2016 and 2020 later transitioned to top roles at Microsoft, where they continue to advance these efforts today under the company’s umbrella,” states the Foundation for Freedom Online.
“Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the recent changes at Meta show Silicon Valley moving in the right direction on free speech,” Bokhari told National Review. “My hope would be that if an American company buys TikTok, they will take a similar direction. I would be concerned if a company like Microsoft or Google, which continue to be deeply involved in censoring disinformation, were to acquire it.”