The Real Reason You Might Be Unable to Tag Portland on TikTok During Trump’s Invasion

President Donald Trump has turned his attention to Portland, Oregon, falsely claiming an “insurrection†is underway in the city. Federal agents have brutalized protesters at an ICE facility in downtown Portland, and Trump has called up National Guard troops to invade the city, though federal courts have put up some roadblocks for the time being.

But if you spend any time on TikTok, you’ve probably seen people claiming over the past week that they can’t tag Portland in their videos. One video with the claim has racked up over 2.8 million views. The popular theory is that there’s censorship happening, now that Trump’s allies are poised to take over the platform.

But TikTok says there’s an explanation that’s related to a change back in August. And they say it has nothing to do with Trump or the impending U.S. ownership of TikTok.

“In August, we rolled out a new rule that limits location tagging for content created using IP-based location (the default in the U.S., since TikTok doesn’t collect precise GPS data here).†Jason Grosse, a spokesperson for TikTok, told Gizmodo over email.

Grosse noted that the new rule only applies to videos that are shot directly in the app. If a user creates a photo or video while using TikTok’s tools, that photo or video can only be tagged using cities in the state where they’re standing or one state over. But that doesn’t apply to photos or videos that are shot with a phone and are sitting in a given user’s gallery.

“But if they upload from their gallery, they can tag any location, including Portland or other cities. This isn’t related to Portland,†the spokesperson said.

That doesn’t explain why some users in Portland still claim they’re having trouble tagging the city, but Gizmodo has been unable to reproduce the claims being made. We had no problem tagging Portland and can see plenty of videos from Portland, both on apolitical topics and from the ICE facility where protests have been concentrated recently. For example, there are videos of a federal agent blasting pepper spray into the air vent of a protester’s frog costume.

Some of the videos from Portland are AI, which is an entirely different can of worms to be addressed. But there doesn’t seem to be anything nefarious going on when it comes to censorship of geotagging for Portland, just a new rule that only allows people taking video from inside the app to actually be standing where they claim to be standing. Or one state over for some reason.

Trump called up members of the Oregon National Guard to deploy to Portland over the weekend, but that was temporarily stopped by a judge on Saturday. Incredibly, Trump tried to call up hundreds of National Guard troops from California the following day, even flying them into Portland. But the judge also put a halt to that on Sunday, noting that the U.S. Department of Justice was playing ignorant in an attempt to flout a court order.

Trump has suggested he might invoke the Insurrection Act, a law from 1792 that would make it easier for the president to deploy troops on American streets. And it’s not just Portland. Trump is targeting every big city that he classifies as Democrat-run.

“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,†Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I do that.â€

Where is Trump getting the idea that Portland is in a state of crisis? Much of it seems to stem from the fact that Fox News keeps playing b-roll from the summer of 2020 in Portland. That was during Trump’s first term, when he cracked down on protests, and secret police were also snatching people from U.S. streets. There was significant property damage in many major cities, all a reaction to police brutality, exemplified by the viral video of George Floyd being murdered by police in Minneapolis that summer.

But what about the rise of right-wing content on TikTok ever since Trump announced Oracle and his ideological buddies would be taking a major stake? Anecdotally, Gizmodo has seen a rise in MAGA-aligned videos flooding our for-you page in recent months. But given current events, that also may have a more innocent explanation that has nothing to do with TikTok tinkering with the algorithm to favor Trump.

The murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10 was pretty much the biggest story in the world at that time, and videos of his death were everywhere. If you watched or interacted with any Kirk videos, the algorithm is going to want to feed you more of that. Whatever you’re watching and engaging with online is going to create a feedback loop. And it really becomes a “chicken or egg†question in our current social media landscape.

Am I seeing videos of white supremacist Nick Fuentes on TikTok (something I’ve never seen prior to recent weeks) because he’s more popular, or is he more popular because the algorithm is showing everyone his videos? It’s incredibly hard to say without access to TikTok’s data. And Fuentes was central to the Kirk story, given the fact that the white supremacist had been trolling Kirk to become more extreme and anti-semitic for years.

The long and the short of it? There doesn’t appear to be censorship of videos coming out of Portland, and we don’t have any evidence right-wing actors have been tinkering with the algorithm to intentionally show everyone fascist bullshit. But that could change very soon. Remember, the TikTok deal hasn’t even been finalized yet. And Trump said last week that he would love for TikTok to become more MAGA.

“If I could, I’d make it 100% MAGA-related,†Trump said in the Oval Office on Sept. 25. “It’s actually a good question, but I would… If I could make it 100% MAGA, I would. But it’s not going to work out that way, unfortunately.â€

We’ll see about that.