TikTok users deleted this app at a higher rate since the company announced this US operations is to be housed in a new joint venture.
The short-form video platform’s daily average app uninstalls in the US have increased by almost 150% in the last five days compared to the previous three months, market research firm Sensor tower said CNBC.
Last Thursday, TikTok said It had formed a joint venture to keep the video-sharing app running in the US under new American leadership. The company named Adam Presser, TikTok’s former chief operating officer, as CEO of the joint venture.
Some users took to social media to express their skepticism about the new joint venture after being asked to agree to an update Privacy Policy on Thursday.
Several social media posts pointed to language in the new policy that describes the types of data TikTok is allowed to collect, including sensitive information such as “your racial or ethnic origin” as well as “sex life or sexual orientation, transgender or non-binary status, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.”
Despite the uproar on social media, this language does not appear to be new. A archived The August 2024 version of the policy contains the same provisions.
These concerns appear to have weighed on sentiment around the app following the joint venture announcement and contributed to a spike in uninstalls in recent days.
“If I can delete my largest platform because its terms and conditions and censorship are out of control, you can too!” Creator Dre Ronayne posted on Threads, the microblogging service from Meta. Ronayne said she had nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok before deleting her account on Sunday.
Other creators have also reported issues posting to the app, with users complaining about outages and failed video uploads.
The social media company hasn’t told its creators what the joint venture means to them, Nadya Okamoto, a TikTok creator with over 4 million followers, told CNBC.
“That’s why there’s so much paranoia, because we all look at this platform and we just don’t know what’s happening,” she said.
Okamoto told CNBC she had been experiencing problems with the app for the past few days and had been unable to upload videos for about 24 hours. During the uncertainty, she continues to post her content on Instagram and Googles YouTube.
“There’s a lot of talk about it online: Is this all a coincidence or is it censorship and what does that look like?” Okamoto said. “For everything to happen at once is very scary.”
An X account associated with the TikTok joint venture said on Monday that the problem with services was caused by a power outage at a US data center.
“We are working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We regret this disruption and hope to resolve it soon,” the account said wrote.
However, the increase in uninstalls has not resulted in a significant decline in US usage.
According to Sensor Tower, TikTok’s active user numbers in the US remained relatively flat compared to the previous week.
However, interest has increased among competing apps. Data from Sensor Tower shows that downloads for UpScrolled in the US increased more than tenfold compared to the previous week, while Skylight Social was up 919% and China’s Rednote was up 53% week-on-week.
TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
