Are Instagram and TikTok enabling right-wing political censorship?

On Monday (January 20), Donald Trump issued an executive order that’s supposed to protect the free speech of US citizens on social media. Critics say this will help enable the spread of misinformation on apps like Instagram, TikTok and X. On the other hand, the Trump administration says that it’s a necessary measure to stop government employees from “unconstitutionally abridg[ing] the free speech” of their citizens. This includes putting pressure on social media companies to take down posts, echoing accusations recently levelled at the outgoing Biden administration by Mark Zuckerberg.

If you’ve been on social media in the first days of Trump’s second term, though, you might have seen a very different picture of the “free speech” paradise promised by the president. On both Instagram and TikTok, US users have complained about the alleged censorship of certain political search terms or hashtags, as well as misinformation warnings that cast doubt on current events.

On Instagram, users reported that searching for terms including #Democrat and #Democrats returned no results, except a “sensitive content” warning that reads: “We’ve hidden these results.” The #Republican hashtag, meanwhile, returned millions of posts.

The parent company of Instagram, Meta, has openly acknowledged this problem on social media, but says that it crosses party lines. “There’s an issue affecting people’s ability to search for a number of different hashtags on Instagram – not just those on the left,” says Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, on Threads. “We’re working quickly to resolve this.”

Screenshots from TikTok, meanwhile, appear to show the suppression of controversial terms related to the election, such as “fascism”, “hitler”, and “Donald Trump rigged election” – according to the users themselves, this suppression is largely limited to the US. Others have pointed to misinformation warnings on posts related to Palestine or the LA fires as evidence of “censorship or propaganda”.

These claims are particularly significant against the backdrop of Trump’s election victory, which has seen tech leaders including Zuckerberg and Elon Musk cosy up to the Republicans. On January 7, Meta announced changes to its fact-checking policies that seemed to fall in line with the new administration’s attitudes toward free expression online. Notably, Trump also delayed a nationwide ban of TikTok during his first days in office, with the app thanking “President Trump’s efforts” in its return announcement. In many cases, this has only fuelled conspiracy theories that TikTok has tweaked its content guidelines to serve Trump’s interests.

That said, TikTok has run warnings alongside controversial or “rapidly unfolding” events for some time, as part of its policy to combat harmful misinformation. Most social media sites also automatically censor search terms like “hitler” and “fascist” as a matter of policy (and for obvious reasons). In other words, while it’s tempting to interpret current censorship as a result of right-wing oppression, this might not always be the case.

Regardless of the cause or intent, any undue censorship will erode public trust in social media, especially when it seems to follow a political bias. “In a hyper-partisan environment, even unintentional errors like this can escalate into accusations of partisanship,” social media expert Matt Navarra tells the BBC, in an interview on Instagram’s hidden search terms. “If these issues are not resolved quickly they risk fuelling conspiracy theories and damaging Meta’s reputation.”