TikTok users are deleting the app at a faster pace following the company’s decision to place its U.S. operations into a new joint venture, exposing a trust deficit that structural change alone cannot fix.
Watch the behaviour the way you would monitor staff attrition after a surprise leadership reshuffle. Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower told CNBC that the daily average of U.S. users deleting TikTok rose nearly 150% over the past five days compared with the previous three months. Shifts of that scale rarely happen without unease taking hold.
Executives positioned the joint venture as a stabilising move. Last Thursday, TikTok said it had formed a new entity to keep the video-sharing app operating in the U.S. under American leadership. The company appointed Adam Presser, formerly TikTok’s head of operations, as chief executive.
Users reacted with scepticism.
Many encountered a prompt to agree to an updated privacy policy and turned to social media. Several posts highlighted language describing the data TikTok may collect, including sensitive information such as “your racial or ethnic origin” and “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.”
That wording is not new. An archived version of the policy from August 2024 includes the same provisions. Timing, however, shapes interpretation. Employees often reread contracts only after a merger, and familiar clauses suddenly feel riskier.
Those concerns appear to have weighed on sentiment, driving the surge in uninstalls following the joint venture announcement.
Creators felt the pressure immediately.
“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 reported technical problems, including outages and failed uploads. The company offered little clarity on how the joint venture affects them.
“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,” Nadya Okamoto, a creator with more than four million followers, told CNBC.
Okamoto said she was unable to upload videos for roughly 24 hours and increased posting on Instagram and Google’s YouTube. The response mirrors how professionals diversify income streams during periods of organisational uncertainty.
“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 linked to the TikTok joint venture attributed the service disruption to a power outage at a U.S. data centre.
“We’re working with our data center partner to stabilise our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon,” the account wrote.
Despite the backlash, uninstalls have not yet translated into reduced engagement. Sensor Tower data shows TikTok’s active U.S. user levels remained largely flat week on week. The gap raises a critical question: how long will users tolerate uncertainty before habits shift for good?
Competitors are already benefiting. Sensor Tower reported that U.S. downloads of UpScrolled increased more than tenfold compared with the prior week. Skylight Social rose 919%, while Chinese-owned Rednote climbed 53%.
Platform migrations rarely happen overnight. They start the way career exits do, with contingency planning and quiet experimentation. If TikTok fails to restore confidence quickly, does this moment fade, or does it mark the opening rivals have been waiting for?
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
Author: George Nathan Dulnuan