Last year, a Bytedance spokesman told Bloomberg that TikTok didn’t remove videos from the Hong Kong protests for political reasons, saying they may have instead been taken down for violating guidelines around violent, graphic, shocking or sensational content.
“For some people, their entire feeds are transformed with Black Lives Matter content on TikTok,” said Daniel Sinclair, an independent researcher who studies TikTok and social media.
Sinclair notes that Chinese officials, state media and social media sites like Douyin, Bytedance’s Chinese version of TikTok, have all been amplifying the violent protests and heated discussions about race unfolding across America.
That same month TikTok banned all political, advocacy, and issue ads from its platform, claiming such ads would undermine TikTok’s “positive environment” according to a company blog post.
“As I see it, a lot of the popular Black Lives Matter posts actually do go against TikTok’s own stated community guidelines,” said Joseph Seering, a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon University who studies content moderation.
