Last night I had the pleasure of chatting to Clare McDonnell on @BBC5Live Drive programme about TikTok censorship and speed throttling concerns from US users of the app, amidst the transfer of TikTok's infrascructure to Oracle's US-based data centres 🎙️

Listen from 2:16:46 🎧: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qjfb

My main points:

📱Yes, I suspect it is very likely TikTok is self-censoring by getting certain controversal hashtags to appear a bit less frequently on their app. They almost got banned from the US entirely and the phrases "ICE" and "Epstein Files" are triggering and divisive right now to all sides of American society.

📱No, I do not think TikTok is deliberately throttling the traffic going to US users. Always remember that IT infrastructure, and many things in tech and engineering, are fraught with problems. Even if you test and prepare prior to a live network switch-over of infrastructure, something can still break! Remember the TSB bank outage😉

📱However, social media giants don't just do what governments want them to do. They have *ways* of handling overreaching content censorship requests...

#TikTok #socialmedia #Oracle #TikTokoutage #censorship #ICE #Epstein #technews #analysis