Chinese Shopping App Temu Censors Searches For 'Trump' And 'Biden'

Not only does it restrict search terms for politically sensitive topics in China - like Xi Jinping, Dalai Lama, and Chinese Communist Party - it is also censoring search results for American political topics as well. Longtime retail industry experts say that censoring some search terms is typical behavior for a China-based retailer serving purely domestic customers, especially since Temu's sellers are almost entirely based in China. It's not clear why Temu has extended this practice of restricting search terms within the United States, where it had an average of 20 million monthly users in the first quarter of 2024, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, up 134 percent year-over-year. Temu's decision to allow Trump-related products while censoring search results "Suggests a deliberate choice to dissociate the products from politically charged discussions," Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the UC Berkeley School of Information and an expert on the Chinese internet, told Forbes by email. Temu is a shopping app, not a content app, but regulators are particularly sensitive to how the Chinese government could be censoring or shaping what Americans see online. "The U.S. consumer may have a bit less choice on Temu or a harder time finding these products as a result, but for Temu that would be a minor trade-off compared to the consequences of upsetting Chinese authorities." Temu's censorship of American political search terms suggests how it plans to export its home country's values as it continues to grow.