Within China, Douyin complies with strict national content regulation. In Thailand, keywords such as #acab, #gayArab and anti-monarchy hashtags were found to be shadowbanned.
In response to ASPI’s research, a TikTok spokesperson said the hashtags may be restricted as part of the company’s localisation strategy and due to local laws. Then in 2020, ASPI found hashtags related to LGBTQ+ are suppressed in at least eight languages on TikTok. In 2019, information about Hong Kong protests was reported to have been censored not only on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, but also on TikTok itself. It’s worth noting this censorship risk isn’t hypothetical. In “shadowbanning”, a user’s posts appear to have been published to the user themselves, but are not visible to anyone else. This means users’ feeds would be filtered to omit anything that doesn’t fit the Chinese government’s agenda, such as support for Taiwan’s sovereignty, as an example. Hypothetically, since TikTok moderates content according to Beijing’s foreign policy goals, it’s possible TikTok could apply censorship controls over Australian users. This carries implications for TikTok users.
However, TikTok’s corporate roots extend to authoritarian China – and not the US, where most of our other social media come from. They all need oceans of user data to push ads onto us, and run data analytics behind a shiny facade of cute cats and trendy dances. In this respect, it’s not different from other social media companies. TikTok collects rich consumer information, including personal information and behavioural data from people’s activity on the app.
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