The rate of app deletions by TikTok users has increased since the company announced it would transfer its U.S. operations to a new joint venture.
Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower told CNBC that the average daily number of U.S. users deleting the TikTok app has increased nearly 150% in the past five days compared to the previous three months.
Last Thursday, TikTok announced it had formed a joint venture to continue operating the video-sharing app under new U.S. guidance. The company has appointed former TikTok operations chief Adam Presser as CEO of the joint venture.
After being prompted to accept the updated privacy policy on Thursday, some users expressed skepticism about the new joint venture on social media.
Several social media posts pointed to language in the new policy that explains the types of data TikTok may collect, including “racial or ethnic origin,” as well as sensitive information such as “sex life or sexual orientation, transgender or nonbinary status, citizenship or immigration status, and financial information.”
Despite the uproar on social media, the term doesn’t appear to be new. An archived version of the August 2024 policy contains the same provisions.
Those concerns appear to have weighed on sentiment around the app after the joint venture was announced, leading to a spike in uninstalls over the past few days.
“If I can take down the biggest platform because terms and censorship have gotten out of control, so can you!” posted on Threads, a microblogging service owned by creator Dre Ronayne. Meta. Ronayne said she had nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok before deleting her account on Sunday.
Other creators have also reported issues with posting to the app, with users complaining of outages and failed video uploads.
Nadia Okamoto, a TikTok creator with more than 4 million followers, told CNBC that social media companies are not telling creators what the joint venture means to them.
“That’s why there’s so much paranoia, because we’re all watching this platform and we have no idea what’s going on,” she said.
Okamoto told CNBC that he had been experiencing issues with the app over the past few days and was unable to upload videos for about 24 hours. Despite the uncertainty, she continues to post content on Instagram. Google YouTube.
“There’s a lot of discussion online about whether this is all a coincidence or censorship and what this looks like,” Okamoto said. “It’s very scary to have everything happen at once.”
The X account associated with the TikTok joint venture said on Monday that the service issue was caused by a power outage at its U.S. data center.
“We are working with our data center partners to stabilize the service. We apologize for this disruption and hope it will be resolved soon,” the account said.
However, the increase in uninstalls has not led to a significant decline in usage in the US.
TikTok’s active user levels in the U.S. have remained relatively flat compared to the previous week, according to Sensor Tower.
However, interest in competing apps is growing. UpScrolled downloads in the U.S. are up more than 10x week-over-week, Skylight Social is up 919% and Chinese-owned Rednote is up 53% week-over-week, according to Sensor Tower data.
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
