“Unfortunately, some individuals and organizations have misused the Center’s search function to draw inaccurate conclusions, so we are changing some of the features to ensure it is used for its intended purpose,” said Alex Haurek, a company spokesman. TikTok said the tool was created in 2020.

The change illuminates the pressure that TikTok has come under since the start of the war. Lawmakers and researchers have scrutinized the app’s influence on young Americans and fears about how Beijing could potentially influence content on TikTok. There have been efforts in Washington to ban the app — an outcome that many consider unlikely — or force a sale of TikTok to an American company.

The Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University, which tracks misinformation and extremism online, flagged the changes last week. The group used it for a report last month that said topics Beijing suppresses inside its borders, like the Uyghur population and Hong Kong protests, were unusually underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.

The researchers said they could no longer find data about the hashtags they studied, including current events like #BLM, #Trump2024 and #Biden.

“Anything that’s politically sensitive or could be politically sensitive or explosive is gone, and anything that is M&M’s or pop culture, no problem,” said Joel Finkelstein, a founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute. “It’s really uncanny to me they didn’t announce it or say something about it.”