Celebrities say they are being censored by TikTok after speaking out against ICE

(pride.com)

Comments

iceflinger 27 January 2026
Not sure why this is flagged? One of the largest social media platforms in the industry changed ownership, its user base is noticing an unexplained change in functionality? Surely that warrants a discussion among tech people?
oefrha 27 January 2026
This is quite out of character for a lawn mower; lawn mowers shouldn't care.
Alifatisk 27 January 2026
Is the country falling apart? So many extreme events is happening over there.
akagusu 27 January 2026
Why does everything ICE related gets flagged on HN?
wormpilled 27 January 2026
Makes sense since Oracle now has complete control of it.
macshaggy 27 January 2026
Celebrities need to stop giving their sht to these SM companies and used Federated social media. So they can own their product and not have to worry about being censored for being anti-government.

Which is hilarious sentence now because this government so pro free speech!!! sarcasm*

But seriously this is something that if my main gig was to create music or some art form, I wouldn't want to be on a corp run platform. I would want to own it myself and the all that data.

rsynnott 27 January 2026
Celebrities should consider maybe not using social media things controlled by the regime? Like, other social media is available.
iinnPP 27 January 2026
This isn't very compelling. It's 2 anecdotes and a pretty damning final paragraph. Is there any more reliable data?
docdeek 27 January 2026
That’s not a very convincing article. One person leaving TikTok claiming she was silenced, and another where a claim of silencing is made but, within 24 hours, the ‘silenced’ video "has more than 220,000 views and over 70,000 likes”. Perhaps there is some silencing going on, but it doesn’t appear that there is much evidence of it in this particular article.
baxtr 27 January 2026
I have a bit of experience with video platforms.

It’s really hard to say which video will work or not. What people react to and what not.

All I’m saying is that this could also potentially be explained by "The Algorithm" per se.

bjourne 27 January 2026
The whole point of the forced sale of TikTok was for the American-Israeli hegemony to exert control over the narrative of the platform. And now it is doing exactly that. Color me surprised.
self_awareness 27 January 2026
This is so American.

They raise alarms because they have low TikTok view counters. But mass killings of Iranian protesters is Iran's own business.

misja111 27 January 2026
> according to TechCrunch, this language has been included in the privacy policy since Aug. 2024, and wasn’t changed in response to the Trump administration’s latest escalation of immigration enforcement, and is “primarily there to comply with state privacy laws like California’s Consumer Privacy Act.”

This is the problem with any kind of censoring media. The initial intentions of those policies might have been good, but these kind of policies can so easily be abused for malign intentions.

niemandhier 27 January 2026
In transparency will do this.

No one can know what TikTok censors or penalizes in its algorithms. All other social media platforms are equally intransparent, what is new is that TikTok is not American.

stanislavb 27 January 2026
Get used to it. Both TikTok and X(twitter) have been used and will be used to manipulate the public opinion in favour of Trump. I'm aware that I can't prove it; however, this explains how Trump won, and how he will win again - manipulating the zombies.
esalman 27 January 2026
Current administration have plenty of time, 3 years to be exact, to turn USA into another Iran.
GeorgeOldfield 28 January 2026
it's almost like it's better to have an external owner of social media companies
jauntywundrkind 27 January 2026
pretty impressive how quickly Ellisons managed to make this whole situation suck and reek badly. they'll turn down the heat & stuff the frog back in the pot, then crank the heat up a bit slower this time, but there is just going to be such endless utterly preposterous censorship and algorithmic biasing for the right wing & ultra capitalist agenda, on and on now.

incredible beyond words that this was a unanimous decision by the supreme court. letting the us government set up whatever arraigned marriage it felt like for buying a social network is some wild meddling with businesses. and here we are, with the ultra capitalists doing exactly what they want to with one of the most popular social networks.

excellent write up for this absolute madness of a court decision, TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706

blell 27 January 2026
Wait until you try to criticise Israel.
rvnx 27 January 2026
Happening because TikTok is under US laws. Use https://www.douyin.com/ then.

And if they wouldn’t, they would be blocked or prevented of doing business in the US.

pavlov 27 January 2026
Ellison’s Murdoch killer flexing its muscles for a mild warmup.

They got Paramount and CBS and TikTok, are allied with Twitter, and still have a chance of grabbing Warner.

I don’t think American billionaires ever particularly liked Murdoch, an Australian, controlling so much of the media environment in their country. Maybe they’ll make an offer for Fox News that the Murdoch heirs can’t refuse.

b65e8bee43c2ed0 27 January 2026
those who were OK with malinformation being suppressed by every platform for two years (from 2020-02 to 2022-02) should be OK with this as well.
krautburglar 27 January 2026
That a handful of private companies (of which, Ellison has big investments in several) have cornered the market on NAND and DRAM -- with some sources saying that these reservations extend into 2029 -- should be far more concerning. They're sprinting toward super-intelligence, while potential competitors can't even buy equipment. Both pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant arguments will seem fatuous when we are all slaves.
gadders 27 January 2026
Maybe no-one is interested in celebrities virtual signalling any more?
deanc 27 January 2026
Poor celebrities. Having their voice stifled by foreign governments on a platform they helped promote.