American users also won’t get search results for Xi Jinping, Uyghur, CCP, Palestine and Israel, among many other terms. Experts told Forbes this restrictive approach is more extreme than other Chinese e-commerce companies.
By Cyrus Farivar, Forbes Staff
Temu, the Chinese retail giant that is aggressively growing in the United States, is extending censorship mandated by the Chinese government to the American market. 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.
Keyword searches for “Trump,” “Biden,” “election,” “president” and “MAGA,” which generate a multitude of results for U.S.-based retailers, return no hits on Temu, despite the fact that such items are actually listed on the platform. Hundreds of Trump and Biden-themed products are available for purchase on the site, like this Trump baseball cap or this set of stickers advertising support for the current American president. While searching for “Trump” pulls up nothing, other terms like “freedom” or “USA” result in Trump merch like a coffee mug or pocket watch or flag.
By contrast, Amazon returns over 10,000 results for Biden, and over 30,000 for Trump. Walmart’s website yields more than 1,000 listings for Biden and Trump each. Target shows 24 results for “Biden,” and 139 results for “Trump,” all of them books.
Temu also does not return searches for “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Palestinian” and “Hamas.” But it does return results for “Nazi” and “Hitler,” which yields numerous German-language and Germany-themed products, such as lapel pins of the German flag. (None of the products appear to include actual Nazi memorabilia.)
“If the Chinese Communist Party can control our apps, it can control Americans’ perceptions and freedom of speech.”
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. But 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. And while Temu’s policies say it bans products that violate national laws, its policies list no specific ban on political terms or items. Temu declined to comment.
“I get why they would not show results for banned topics in China, but not showing results for U.S. topics is odd,” Juozas Kaziukėnas, the CEO of Marketplace Pulse, an independent e-commerce analysis firm, told Forbes. “Temu seems to be trying to preemptively avoid embarrassment or bad PR, but no other retailer approaches the same way.”
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. In other words, it may be a way to satisfy the authorities back in Beijing.
However, Temu could also be making a deliberate choice to not call attention to products that may be considered divisive in the United States, according Mike Ryan, an analyst with Smarter Ecommerce. “[Temu wants] to be as family-friendly as possible, reach the widest base possible and they don't want to do anything that might risk sales volumes,” he told Forbes in a text message. “It's not political, not ideological – it's just practical.”
But Temu is already in the crosshairs of lawmakers concerned about Chinese companies operating in the United States. Earlier this month, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) wrote in a public letter to President Joe Biden that Temu represented an “urgent threat” to America, adding that the app “is a pipeline of dumped, counterfeit, and slave-labor products from China that is also gathering massive quantities of Americans’ personal data.” Cotton and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) have now called for a federal investigation into the company.
Similar data concerns led President Biden to sign a law that will force fellow Chinese tech giant ByteDance to either sell TikTok to an American buyer within nine months or face a ban in the United States. Lawmakers also fear that the Chinese government could use TikTok to influence the views of its 170 million American users.
“China is our chief foreign adversary in the world," Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) said this past week on the Senate floor. "They are a threat to our national security, to our values, our economy, and the [Chinese Communist Party] works tirelessly every day to undermine our entire way of life. TikTok is one of the ways they're doing that."
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.
“If the Chinese Communist Party can control our apps, it can control Americans’ perceptions and freedom of speech,” Sen. Rubio told Forbes by email. “Beijing’s censorship and repression have no place in America, whether on Temu or TikTok.”
“The U.S. consumer may have a bit less choice on Temu (vs. Amazon for example) 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. “This selective filtering highlights the complexities international companies face when balancing local expectations with operational and cultural practices from their home countries,” Qiang said.
Other Chinese e-commerce companies do not appear to have gone as far as Temu. AliExpress, a popular shopping site owned by the Alibaba Group, returns over 1,000 items for Biden and Trump. However, the site shows no items for the search terms “Xi Jinping,” “communist,” “Dalai Lama” or “Taiwan flag.” On TikTok Shop, dozens of Trump t-shirts, stickers, and cards are readily available as are other apparel items that mock President Biden.
“Temu may be taking an extra cautious approach here,” Sky Canaves, a retail analyst with EMarketer, who previously worked as an analyst and as a journalist in China, told Forbes by email. “The U.S. consumer may have a bit less choice on Temu (vs. Amazon for example) 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.”
The lack of search results for “Biden” or “Trump” does not seem to apply to other world leaders. But searching for Rishi Sunak, the prime minister of the United Kingdom; Fumio Kishida, the prime minister of Japan; Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia; and Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, returns no directly related items.
Temu launched in the United States in 2022. Its parent company, PDD Holdings Inc., has spent big on television advertising during the 2023 and 2024 Super Bowls, encouraging Americans to “shop like a billionaire.” New survey data released recently from YouGov shows that this marketing blitz has paid off: nearly all Americans surveyed said they had heard of the company.
PDD Holdings, which also owns an enormous sister online merchant site called Pinduoduo that only operates in China, is worth more than $167 billion. PDD Holdings is technically based in the Cayman Islands. Last week, Fortune reported that Temu’s Boston office — its official American headquarters — is actually quite small, with only “fewer than 20 people,” who work in “legal or tax roles.” The company has over 17,000 employees worldwide, according to its most recent annual report, the overwhelming majority of which are believed to be working in China.
Last Thursday, PDD Holdings announced record annual profits of over $8.4 billion in 2023, which includes approximately $5 billion in net income attributed to “other subsidiaries of PDD Holdings,” a group that includes Temu. That’s nearly twice as much as the $3.4 billion in profits brought in by the Chinese arm of the company.
