President-elect Trump is pictured in front of the TikTok logo. (Getty Images)
NCRI said it analyzed TikTok, X, and Instagram "to evaluate their handling of specific hashtags associated with the 2020 election controversy" and that researchers received a response that "explicitly indicated content suppression based on TikTok’s enforcement of its community standards."
The group said terms such as "#RiggedElection," "#VoterFraud," "#StopTheSteal," and "#StolenElection" returned no results on TikTok in the U.S. Researchers said that when they searched using software that swapped their domestic location for one overseas, those terms produced video results.
Screen grabs provided by NCRI show a Jan. 24 TikTok search for "#F***JoeBiden" that returned 37,000 results. A search the same day for "#F***Trump" returned none. Three days later, Fox News replicated the search and there were videos listed under both.
REPUBLICAN STATE AGS AWAIT TRUMP-BROKERED TIKTOK DEAL, REMAIN SKEPTICAL ON APP SAFETY
"The concern is that the Chinese Communist Party and Bytedance and TikTok itself can consistently tweak its algorithm to cover up its tracks," Sohn said.
A screenshot of an update in the TikTok app on Saturday, Jan. 18, 2025. (Fox News Digital)
Cybersecurity experts told Fox that algorithms for apps like TikTok are held closely by their parent companies and can be difficult to evaluate.
"Doing sort of this community management of these vast social media platforms, especially TikTok, which is so popular, is a Herculean task," said Theresa Payton, a cybersecurity expert and the White House Chief Information Officer in the George W. Bush administration. "It could be that as they were making tweaks to handle capacity, to be able to more closely evaluate things that could be perceived as election interference, things that are considered hate speech."
Others note social media companies have sizable teams working with automated software to moderate content on their platforms.
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"Someone interprets something as in terms of a violation [that] may not match with someone else – it all sort of has to add up to a pattern," said Pete Pachal, the Founder of The Media Copilot, a newsletter on AI changing media and journalism. "In the report, they do a very good job of showing that this pattern of supposed repression … content not appearing in searches does tend to happen more in one direction, and that should arouse a certain amount of suspicion."
Rich Edson currently serves as a senior national correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC). He joined the FOX Business Network (FBN) as a Washington correspondent in October 2007 and transitioned to FNC in 2015.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tiktok-suppressed-content-critical-trump-exclusive-report-alleges