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It may surprise you, but TikTok would have been censoring content on its social network More specifically those in which ugly people appeared, were it showed poverty, people with diverse abilities and those in which institutions such as the police and other state bodies are criticized or in which they have a significant burden of political discourse. So the social network for young people would not seem as open as it does.
The information comes directly from a report by The Intercept, where they have had access to two internal TikTok documents with control guides for content Some tools with which they would make sure to grow quickly by filtering content that is supposedly free and open to everyone.
Censorship and control
These are two moderation documents that, after The Intercept Brazil's investigations, seem to be originally written in Chinese and then poorly translated into English to work with them in the different TikTok offices for the rest of the world. With them, the moderators of the application would filter the content that can reach the For You tab within the application. All this, supposedly, in order to make TikTok more attractive to everyone and reach more people.
These documents advise moderators to ban videos showing beer bellies, non-normative body shapes, obesity, or even extreme thinness.Nor do they fall short when it comes to scissoring videos with weird faces. And they specify that not only has this ban been limited to videos with deformities, even faces with too many wrinkles would have no place on TikTok. And here the thing does not end.
Also listed as items to veto on TikTok are references to rural places of poverty, to very dirty or very messy places. And it is that they ensure that these videos may seem unattractive to new users who come to the application, so they should be avoided.
The other document fully touches on the topic of direct or live TikTok videos. Here, beyond pornographic, pedophilic and sexual content that you want to avoid, there are spaces to censor other details such as speeches that violate or attack national security, or, even more striking, insult civil state workers or leaders of the themselves.And it doesn't matter if it's in eastern or western countries.
But do all these control lines apply?
According to the sources consulted by The Intercept, these documents would be in force in the hands of the TikTok moderators and active until the end of 2019. Of course, when the company was asked, a spokesperson ensures that they handle different documents and that they are not always applied. Or no longer active for some time.
In our tests with TikTok, however, it has not been difficult for us to find all kinds of content supposedly banned by these documents. From people with deformities, missing limbs or strange appearance, to all kinds of content that doesn't usually seem moral or nice. Of course, for this, you may have to search within the social network.
Do not forget that in these censorship documents the user's profile is not always closed. It can also be filtered to prevent it from appearing automatically, but without removing it from TikTok. A measure that makes one suspect that it is not as accessible and diverse a tool as it seems. Even more so coming from a business group, ByteDance, closely related to the Chinese Communist Party, according to the US government.
Update
TikTok has sent us a statement regarding this information. “Most of the rules presented on The Intercept are no longer used, or in some cases appear to have never been in place, but it is right that for live streaming, TikTok remains especially vigilant in keeping sexual content out. platform.”
