Much ado about nothing? TikTok’s U.S. usership steadies after turbulent start

TikTok’s U.S. joint venture seems to have survived a turbulent rollout with minimal change in usership, as early narratives of a mass user exodus prompted by service outages and censorship concerns now appear overstated, according to new figures.

Survey data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower show that, despite a surge in deletions following the announcement of TikTok’s U.S. joint venture on Jan. 23, the average number of TikTok’s daily active users in the U.S. remains around 95% of its usership compared to the week of Jan. 19-25.

The joint venture — officially the TikTok USDS Joint Venture — was established in compliance with U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order mandating the divestiture of TikTok in the U.S. from its Chinese parent company ByteDance.

While ByteDance retains a 19.9% stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations after the agreement, Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX each own a 15% share, with the remaining shares divvied among several other firms.

Following the announcement, users were quick to express discontent over TikTok’s new ownership.

The deal drew scrutiny, with prominent figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) raising concerns about cronyism over Oracle co-founder and Chief Technical Officer Larry Ellison’s involvement.

Following the joint venture’s announcement that Ellison’s Oracle would “retrain, test, and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data”, online speculation mounted that TikTok would begin mining user data or promoting content supportive of Trump’s policy positions.

Such concerns spiked on Jan. 25, with users claiming that TikTok was suppressing content critical of controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, and censoring buzzwords like ‘Epstein’ on the platform.

Last month, CNBC confirmed that messages containing the word “Epstein” triggered an error message, but was unable to independently verify broader claims of political censorship.

Asked about the issues, a spokesperson for the TikTok joint venture told CNBC in January that the platform does not prohibit sharing the name ‘Epstein’ in messages and that it was investigating why some users are experiencing the problem, among others.

CNBC reached out to the White House and TikTok for comment but did not receive a response by publication.

Although TikTok attributed last month’s disruptions to power outages, the glitches “no doubt impact[ed] how and what content was being served, even without any intent or motive,” according to Jim Johnston, partner at law firm Davis+Gilbert LLP.

Yet despite various user pledges to boycott the platform over apparent political suppression, engagement metrics among U.S. users suggest there has been little sign of a mass exodus.

The average daily time spent by American users on the platform has since returned to around 80 minutes, after dipping to an average of 77 minutes during the week of the reported disruptions, according to Sensor Tower data.

Additionally, while deletions spiked after the reported disruptions, they tapered off the following week, suggesting a temporary surge rather than a sustained boycott of the app.

“It is plausible that the short-lived rise in observed uninstalls was due to an attempt to troubleshoot the app,” Abraham Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, told CNBC, as the number of uninstalls followed by re-installations on the same day surged more than 70% on Jan. 25 from the day before.

While Yousef grants that the data suggests a “slight impact to overall usage” in the weeks after the Joint Venture was announced, there is no clear indication of a structural shift in user trends, as many sites touted as alternatives to TikTok have also struggled to sustain interest.

According to Sensor Tower, the number of new installs for UpScrolled – a social media platform that offers an algorithm free of automated systems that filter out content from some users known as shadow banning – surged by about 770% from the previous week, with more than 955,000 new U.S. downloads over the week of Jan. 26 to Feb. 1.

New UpScrolled downloads, however, fell sharply by about 80% the following week, bringing in only around 191,000 new users. In comparison, TikTok registered 870,000 downloads over the week of Jan. 26 to Feb. 1, and around 800,000 the following week.

Similarly, new downloads of other alternative platforms such as Skylight Social and Red Note respectively declined by 96% and 33% week-on-week from the week of Jan. 26.

Sensor Tower’s user data more fundamentally seems to suggest that beyond anecdotal claims, users have largely been unable to identify tangible changes in TikTok’s American operations, or at least, not enough to meaningfully shift user sentiment.

“The idea of a mass exodus from TikTok now looks overblown,” Kelsey Chickering, principal analyst from Forrester, told CNBC. “Anecdotally, most users say the app feels largely the same – the algorithm hasn’t meaningfully changed, and the experience is still strong,”

While some American users may have perceived changes in the operation of their TikTok algorithms, “some changes to content suggestions are bound to occur simply due to the changed data set,” according to Johnston, referring to the Joint Venture’s announcement to retrain the algorithm on U.S. data.

But while analysts have been unable to find evidence that TikTok’s new American owners have engineered the platform in their favor, this is not a foregone conclusion.

According to Johnston, there are at least three notable changes to TikTok’s new terms of use, including the platform’s ability to collect precise location data from enabled devices, its collection of data on interactions with artificial intelligence tools on the app and its explicit integration with ad networks.

Although there has been no hard evidence of its occurrence, it remains technically possible to adjust TikTok’s algorithm to enhance or diminish the impact of certain types of content on recommendations, Johnston said.

Chickering adds that under its new owners, TikTok has more control over what shows up on American feeds, but this control, according to Chickering, is where TikTok’s opportunity – and risk – lies.

“If moderation starts to feel politically slanted or misinformation isn’t adequately addressed, the platform could face backlash from users and advertisers alike,” Chickering said, “We’ve seen this play out before: Twitter’s shift to X is a recent reminder of how quickly trust can erode.”

For now, however, the discontent from TikTok’s American users that marred its first few weeks under new ownership seems to have largely subsided.

As Chickering notes, “we’ve seen time and time again, if the product works, users tend to stick around regardless of who owns it.”

— CNBC’s Dylan Butts contributed to this report.