TikTok users have been deleting the app at a higher rate since the company announced that its U.S. operations would be housed in a new joint venture.
The short-form video platform’s daily average app removals in the U.S. have increased nearly 150% over the past five days compared with the previous three months, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower told CNBC.
Last Thursday, TikTok said it had formed a joint venture to keep the video-sharing app operating in the U.S. under new American leadership. The company named Adam Presser, formerly TikTok’s head of operations, as CEO of the joint venture.
Some users took to social media to voice their skepticism about the new joint venture after being prompted to agree to an updated privacy policy on Thursday.
Several social media posts pointed to language in the new policy that describes the types of data TikTok may collect, including sensitive information such as “your racial or ethnic origin” as well as “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.”
Despite the social media uproar, that language does not appear to be new. An archived version of the policy from August 2024 includes the same provisions.
Those concerns appear to have weighed on sentiment around the app after the announcement of the joint venture, contributing to a spike in uninstalls over the past several days.
“If I can delete my biggest platform because their terms of agreement and censorship have gotten out of control, so can you!” creator Dre Ronayne posted on Threads, the micro-blogging service owned by Meta. Ronayne said she had nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok before deleting her account on Sunday.
Other creators have also reported problems posting to the app, with users complaining about outages and video uploads failing to go through.
The social media company hasn’t communicated to its creators what the joint venture means for them, Nadya Okamoto, a TikTok creator with over 4 million followers, told CNBC.
“That’s why there is so much paranoia, because we’re all kind of looking at this platform and we just don’t know what’s happening,” she said.
Okamoto told CNBC she has experienced issues with the app over the past several days and has been unable to upload videos for roughly 24 hours. During the uncertainty, she is continuing to post her content on Instagram and Google’s YouTube.
“Online there’s a lot of conversation about — is this all coincidence or censorship, and what does this look like?” Okamoto said. “For everything to be happening at once, it is very scary.”
An X account associated with the TikTok joint venture said on Monday that the services issue was caused by a power outage at a U.S. data center.
“We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon,” the account wrote.
However, the increase in uninstalls has not translated into a meaningful drop in U.S. usage.
TikTok’s active user levels in the U.S. have remained relatively flat compared with the previous week, according to Sensor Tower.
Competing apps, however, have seen a bump in interest. Sensor Tower data shows U.S. downloads for UpScrolled increased more than tenfold compared with the prior week, while Skylight Social rose 919% and Chinese-owned Rednote climbed 53% week over week.
TikTok did not respond to request for comment.
