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IPFS News Link • Censorship

INVISIBLE CENSORSHIP

• Sam Biddle, Paulo Victor Ribeiro, Tatiana Dias

THE MAKERS OF TIKTOK, the Chinese video-sharing app with hundreds of millions of users around the world, instructed moderators to suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. These same documents show moderators were also told to censor political speech in TikTok livestreams, punishing those who harmed "national honor" or broadcast streams about "state organs such as police" with bans from the platform.

These previously unreported Chinese policy documents, along with conversations with multiple sources directly familiar with TikTok's censorship activities, provide new details about the company's efforts to enforce rigid constraints across its reported 800 million or so monthly users while it simultaneously attempts to bolster its image as a global paragon of self-expression and anything-goes creativity. They also show how TikTok controls content on its platform to achieve rapid growth in the mold of a Silicon Valley startup while simultaneously discouraging political dissent with the sort of heavy hand regularly seen in its home country of China.

On TikTok, livestreamed military movements and natural disasters, video that "defamed civil servants," and other material that might threaten "national security" has been suppressed alongside videos showing rural poverty, slums, beer bellies, and crooked smiles. One document goes so far as to instruct moderators to scan uploads for cracked walls and "disreputable decorations" in users' own homes — then to effectively punish these poorer TikTok users by artificially narrowing their audiences.


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