Censorship on TikTok

In January 2019, the Chinese government said that it would start to hold app developers like ByteDance responsible for user content shared via apps such as Douyin,[3] and listed 100 types of content that the Chinese government would censor.[4] It was reported that certain content unfavorable to the Chinese Communist Party has already been limited for users outside of China such as content related to the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests or Tibetan independence.[5] TikTok has blocked videos about human rights in China, particularly those that reference Xinjiang internment camps and abuses of ethnic and religious minorities such as the Uyghurs, and disabled the accounts of users who post them.[6][7][8][9] TikTok's policies also ban content related to a specific list of foreign leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Mahatma Gandhi because it can stir controversy and attacks on political views.[10] Its policies also ban content critical of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and content considered pro-Kurdish.[11] TikTok was reported to have censored users supportive of the Citizenship Amendment Act protests in India and those who promote Hindu-Muslim unity.[12] On 27 November 2019, TikTok temporarily suspended the account of 17-year-old Afghan-American user Feroza Aziz after she posted a video, disguised as a makeup tutorial, drawing attention to the internment camps of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China.[13] TikTok later apologized and explained that her account was suspended as a result of human error, and her account has since been reinstated.[14] In July 2020, TikTok suspended the account of another user whose viral video called attention to human rights of the Uyghurs.[9]

In June 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that some previously non-political TikTok users were airing pro-Beijing views for the explicit purpose of boosting subscribers and avoiding "shadow" bans.[15] In July 2020, the company announced it was pulling out of Hong Kong responding to the Hong Kong national security law.[16]

In March 2020, internal documents leaked to The Intercept revealed that moderators had been instructed to suppress posts created by users deemed "too ugly, poor, or disabled" for the platform, and to censor political speech in livestreams, punishing those who harmed "national honor" or broadcast streams about "state organs such as police" with bans from the platform.[17][18][19] In response to censorship concerns, TikTok's parent company hired K&L Gates, including former U.S. Congressmen Bart Gordon and Jeff Denham, to advise it on its content moderation policies.[20][21] TikTok also hired lobbying firm, Monument Advocacy.[22] In January 2021, TikTok banned Trump content deemed to be inciting violence.[23]

In June 2020, The Times of India reported that TikTok was "shadow banning" videos related to the Sino-Indian border dispute and the 2020 China–India skirmishes.[24]

In November 2020, a former TikTok executive stated to a UK parliamentary committee that TikTok censored content critical of China and particularly content related to the Uyghur genocide.[25]

On 3 February 2021, TikTok received praise from Russian officials because social app's cooperation with them in deletion of "forbidden" content, mostly related to protest activity in Russia. In particular, as media censorship agency Roskomnadzor official Evgeniy Zaitsev stated that, "we need to highlight TikTok among other social media platforms because it has office in Russia and actively cooperated with us, which cannot be said about others".[26] Also, the State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein said that TikTok new anti-fake news policies go well with the ideology of Russian content censorship law and edition of those "should be considered a very positive signal".[27]

According to Mar Hicks, creators on TikTok feel that they have to be overly cautious about what they post "because the rules change at any given moment, there's no transparency".[28] Hicks said that the sudden disappearance of tags, intentional or not, has "incredibly problematic effects and negative effects on communities that are already marginalized and erased".[28] The muddiness around content removal and moderation on TikTok is an ongoing frustration for the app's users.[28] TikTok has community guidelines, but there is no public list of specific words and phrases that are banned, and it is not clear how much moderation is done algorithmically versus by actual people.[28] In instances of protesting against acts of racism and racism as a whole, users have felt that there was a change in the popularity of their content, even so much as their content not showing up as frequently or even at all.[29]

Black people

TikTok users were encouraged to change their profile picture to the symbol of the black power fist (pictured) in solidarity with African-American creators on TikTok.

On May 7, 2020, in honor of the upcoming birthday of Malcolm X on May 19, a TikTok user named Lex Scott encouraged viewers to protest TikTok suppression of African-American creators by changing their profile pictures to the raised fist symbol, following black creators, and unfollowing creators who didn't support the initiative. The day was termed the #ImBlackMovement. Thousands of TikTok users changed their profile picture, and the hashtag #blackvoicesheard reached over 6 million views by the morning of May 19.[33] After the murder of George Floyd sparked racial unrest in the United States, creators on TikTok claimed that TikTok was deliberately suppressing videos using the hashtags "#BlackLivesMatter" and "#GeorgeFloyd", in that videos that used these hashtags appeared to receive no views. TikTok released a statement apologizing for this, saying a technical glitch had caused the display error and that the hashtags had received more than 2 billion views.[2] Hicks argues that LGBT people and people of color have found that the guidelines are enforced "wildly differently", meaning their content will be suppressed or removed for supposed violations and that reports of harassment from other users are not acted upon. "Not only is it hurting their ability to speak and be seen on the app", says Hicks, "but it's also allowing them to get attacked and have hate speech thrown their way."[28]