TikTok suppressed content critical of Trump and 2020 election controversy, exclusive report alleges

TikTok maintains the report has reached a false conclusion, and that the researchers used terms subjected to additional safety measures because they've been associated with election misinformation or profanity.

The report, from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University, contained findings that "highlight TikTok's ability to act as a powerful influence tool, adaptable to partisan politics, but with no inherent incentive for transparency or accountability."

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."

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. 

"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.

"Our policies and algorithms haven't changed in the last week," said a TikTok spokesperson.

The company maintains hashtags regarding the 2020 election controversies have promoted election misinformation, which is why they've been unavailable. TikTok contends that because the anti-Trump and anti-Biden search terms contain profanity, the app can limit those results. The company also says it's experiencing technical issues as it's trying to return its service to normal.

NCRI has issued several reports on TikTok, concluding its search algorithm produced results to construct a favorable view of China's government. TikTok has denied that allegation, calling NCRI's work "flawed" and "clearly engineered to reach a false, predetermined conclusion." In its arguments against TikTok, the Justice Department under the Biden administration cited NCRI's reports.

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.