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TikTok Admits to “Shadow Banning” Posts With LGBTQ Hashtags

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The TikTok logo over a pride flag, censoring the colors of the flag to black and white. TikTok is the international version of an app created by ByteDance. ByteDance, if you haven’t been paying attention, is a company in China. It’s a company that China cares deeply about. Its international popularity, data collection, and data analytics, are incredibly valuable to the Chinese government. China likes to have tabs on all of its citizens as well as anyone else who could visit the country, so an app like TikTok is incredible.

But there’s another aspect of its Chinese ownership we should discuss. China does not provide anything remotely close to equality for LGBTQ people. It’s a holdout from its contact with the west, like much of homophobia worldwide. While it is legal just to be LGBTQ in China, same-sex couples cannot marry or adopt. Transgender children and adults cannot change their gender markings on IDs until they are 20, and then only with surgery, which not all transgender people want. Intersex people, like those in most of the world, are subjected to forced surgeries.

China’s own government-managed social network, Weibo, frequently bans LGBTQ posts. WeChat, a Chinese social networking and communication app is one of the most popular apps in the world. It censors LGBTQ content. Chinese media also tries to ignore LGBTQ people altogether. China seems to want to roll back same-sex rights, but has found opposition.

That brings us to TikTok. They’ve faced scrutiny in the past over some anti-LGBTQ decisions, but those were often reversed and called “bugs.” Now TikTok’s coming clean: they have been reducing the visibility of LGBTQ content in certain languages.

Yes, languages. Even if you leave your oppressive homeland, TikTok will still censor you like you never left.

In This Article:

The Shadow Ban

A search for the hashtag "GayArab" on TikTok revealed no posts, even after researchers submitted a video with the hashtag.

This is what shadow banning looks like. The post doesn’t show up, even with the hashtag. via ASPI

You may have heard of a “shadow ban” before, but in case you haven’t, here’s what it means. When you’re banned from using a service, you know it. You can no longer access the service, you get a message on why you were banned, and you know if/when the ban will run out.

A shadow ban is different. With this, you can continue to post, continue to share whatever you want. However, people either won’t see it at all, or only those who interact with your posts most frequently will see it. It’s a way to reduce visibility so as few people as possible see your posts. That way, it discourages posting about certain topics, or discourages the person from posting at all, as they don’t get messages and likes. It’s like trying to bring up a topic at a social gathering and having all of your friends ignore you. You won’t try that again.

It’s easy to figure out if topics or hashtags themselves have been shadow banned. You can simply look at the reactions on different posts when you misspell or omit certain hashtags. This is how LGBTQ users caught YouTube demonetizing LGBTQ content, something it still does. It’s also how people get around censorship worldwide.

Banned Hashtags

Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) proved TikTok’s censorship. Their International Cyber Policy Center tested various hashtags and key phrases across multiple languages. They were able to prove that TikTok wasn’t just trying to comply with local laws, but was casting a wide net with their censorship. This wasn’t to protect LGBTQ people in countries where speaking out about being LGBTQ could mean imprisonment or death, it was to silence as many LGBTQ people as possible, while still potentially leaving them in harm’s way.

“One TikTok user living in South East Asia told me, while they were disappointed that their gender identity was being categorised as inappropriate in their native language, they knew the ways around the bans and frequently used them. They added: ‘That’s just part of what being LGBT in 2020 is.'”

– Ben Hunte, for BBC News

Banned Phrases

A list of the banned phrases. It includes "Gay," "lesbian," "transgender," and coming out sentences in Russian, Arabic, Ukranian, Bulgarian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Estonian, and Bosnian. TikTok banned phrases like, “GayArab,” (yes, in English) which it outright blocked on the platform. You couldn’t find posts via this hashtag, but, like all shadow bans, users could still share this content. They didn’t know they were shouting into an empty void. Other banned phrases included Russian and Arabic phrases for gay, lesbian, and transgender. Interestingly, TikTok was also filtering “ACAB”, which stands for “All Cops Are Bastards.” It’s been a rallying cry for protests in both the United States and Hong Kong, where police forces clash with protesters, turning protests violent. In the United States, it’s based on the idea that participation in a racist system without combating it props up racism. It also expresses frustration around a lack of accountability for police who break the law or kill people without reason.

The phrases represent a large number of people, and English speakers as well as Russian and Arabic speakers. However, TikTok claims the English censorship was a mistake. This isn’t the first time TikTok has made the exact same “mistake.”

TikTok’s Excuse is Homophobic Too

Besides claiming that the English hashtag filtering was a “mistake,” TikTok also stated that they blocked these hashtags to prevent porn. This is, in itself, an incredibly homophobic excuse. A person’s existence is not a fetish. People are LGBTQ. Who a person is is not for TikTok to dismantle and reduce to porn. It would be as though TikTok blocked hashtags for “Black” or “Latino” based on the fact that people could search for porn based on race. A person’s identity is not a porn category, and by playing into it, TikTok fetishizes people’s identities, reducing real people to a subgenre of porn.

TikTok’s excuse for homophobic censorship was to double down on their homophobia.

Language-Based Filtering

Searching for the Russian word for "Gay" results "no posts." The hashtag is shadow banned.TikTok claimed that the ban on English hashtags was a mistake. However, banning anything based on the language it’s posted in doesn’t make sense unless you’re trying to cast the widest net as possible with your censorship. Someone could have left Russia, or the Middle East, and still want to increase visibility for LGBTQ people. They may still want to show pride, or participate in the online LGBTQ community. But because of the language they speak, TikTok will keep them locked in the closet of their homophobic homeland.

But it’s also inaccurate. English is one of the most common languages spoken in India. However, again, as a result of western colonization, India is not friendly to LGBTQ people. Homosexuality was only just decriminalized in 2018, and transgender people only won the right to change their gender marker after surgery in 2019. There are no anti-discrimination laws or same sex marriage. English does not guarantee that a person lives in a country with protections or any civil rights for LGBTQ people. After all, English is the primary language in the United States, and politicians are still trying to limit and roll back LGBTQ rights.

Language-based filtering is unfair an inaccurate. It casts a wide net, intentionally silencing people who already face or have faced oppression. It goes well beyond complying with local laws that could prohibit such speech. In fact, last year, The Guardian found TikTok censored pro-LGBTQ content even in countries where homosexuality has never been illegal or policed. They’ve also censored transgender people all over the world, including in the U.S. and U.K., where politicians have attacked transgender people with renewed ferocity since Trump’s election. TikTok is intentionally silencing those who may have the right and the need to speak out. They’re censoring people who, if they remain silent, could lose their rights.

Given China’s well-established love of censorship and anti-LGBTQ culture, it’s not surprising that TikTok would take those guidelines worldwide and use them without discretion.

Author’s Note:

Due to TikTok’s long history of censorship, from many previous instances of LGBTQ censorship to censoring people speaking out about China’s concentration camps for Uighur Muslims and censoring language about protests and policing, I’ve stayed far away from TikTok, and I suggest others do the same. I’ll admit, I like when videos reach other platforms from TikTok, but this kind of censorship is exactly why I don’t use TikTok.

That and the fact that they’re gobbling up as much data as they can and directly giving it to a government that discriminates against the LGBTQ community.

You can choose to continue using TikTok. It’s a fun app. But do try to raise awareness and speak out against TikTok’s censorship if you do. You could help change the platform for millions of users worldwide.

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