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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

TikTok is a social network that could not be made by an American company, due to its complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship.

This is a major part of its success, due to not allowing its network to deteriorate into culture wars and general unpleasant behaviour.

I suspect any future social network much like TikTok will have exclusion as a major feature.

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Can you please source your claims? AFAIK TikTok ended censorship. You can even find vids with a lot of views talking about things like Tienamen Square, and I know friends whose FYPs are pretty political. It seems to me that you are confusing TikTok with Douyin (the Chinese version.)

The thing is, TikTok's audience self-censors. People go on the app to feel good, not because they want to be dragged into another political debate or negativity-inducing spiral like with literally every other social media.

TikTok employs a lot of moderators and they go much farther than facebook or twitter by hiding or removing videos that are not upbeat or fun.

I couldn't find a recent source for this. My understanding is that the audience of TikTok does not watch it for content that "is not upbeat or fun," effectively self-censoring the platform.

People download TikTok specifically for the fun and upbeat content, so negative content naturally does not rise to the top (unless it is particularly comedic.)

Here's a source: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

Of course since the news has come out:

>TikTok spokesperson Josh Gartner told The Intercept that “most of” the livestream guidelines reviewed by The Intercept “are either no longer in use, or in some cases appear to never have been in place,” but would not provide specifics.

How far you believe them is up to you.

> AFAIK TikTok ended censorship.

Not GP but one of the concierges from my building left to work there on 'content moderation' not too long ago (er, just before Christmas iirc). Sounded like they have people literally sit there, scrolling (or swiping, whatever you do) watching like a user, but marking (perhaps voting 1 of N I suppose) go/no-go.

While I wouldn't be surprised by this at all, I also think the algorithm is so good that it generally just blocks out content you don't interact with. It's always pretty obvious when the algo bubbles up a new topic completely outside of my normal feed, and when I linger, I'll start seeing more.

isn't this actually the defining feature of commercial American television? You don't see a lot of incisive political commentary on Dancing with the Stars or a season of Survivor either

basically cleansing entertainment of anything that could be considered incendiary and replacing it with people doing funny dances is something the American ad industry came up with a century ago.

Like it's not as if American popular entertainment looks like German ARTE or some Scandinavian drama where politics and culture is baked into everything

What I love about tiktok is how they've managed to ban all political content. It's a social network which is fun precisely because it's not monopolised by rotten people with loads of free time.

Political content isn't banned, it just doesn't perform well with the audience on TikTok, which is generally younger and mostly less interested in politics. Usually when I see political content it is from someone dueting the original content to troll it, and the troll outperforms the original.

People try to get their political content trending on TikTok, but it seems like it usually just gets parodied and they basically get laughed off the platform.

It is not just about audience. The political content is definitely de-emphasised and made harder to appear on peoples stream. It does not just happen by itself. It is moderated.

I really don't think it is as human curated as you think. A lot of political content is very low effort. For example boring political rants that regurgitate the same tired old political lines that we've already heard a million times before. This stuff doesn't last long on For You page because it doesn't have people watching it loop multiple times, and it doesn't get likes, so the algorithm deemphasizes it.

I have seen high effort political content hit the FYP page though and get millions of views. Like there is a guy who composes his own songs with a political theme and sings and dances them. That hits FYP all the time, because it is high effort and engaging, and people enjoy the tune and watch it loop a few times.

High effort political content does succeed and does hit FYP, but it is rare to see because most people haven't figured out how to do it right for the TikTok audience. The kind of tired old outrage memes that make it on Twitter won't succeed on TikTok because they don't generate the same algorithmic signals.

> they've managed to ban all political content

Can you please source this claim? Plenty of people see highly political content on their FYP, but it is a niche within TikTok because it's not really why people use it.

> What I love about tiktok is how they've managed to ban all political content.

This is... not my experience with TikTok at all. I think what you've just described is your own little filter bubble that Tiktok presents.

My Tiktok is very gay. Not that that is political, but I get a lot of trans rights content, queer issues/advocacy, BLM content, pro-choice content, "landlords are evil" content etc etc and usually its funny and witty and I love it.

You say it is not your experience then you say you don't get political content.

Sorry for being unclear - I meant to say that just generally gay content is not political. Everything else I listed after I think is somewhat political (because politics is more than just saying “Republicans are bad!!!”)

> but I get a lot of trans rights content, queer issues/advocacy, BLM content, pro-choice content, "landlords are evil" content

I guess it depends on what you would label as political. Breitbart (sigh… I know) stated that “Politics is downstream of culture”. It’s not a new idea but I have no doubt that these non-political spaces will serve as cultural funnels into various ideological bubbles.

It's kinda unbelievable that there so much praise for their tightly controlled content and so much scorn for moderation done by Twitter or Reddit. It goes to show how much people's judgement is based on expectations and not absolutes.

I keep seeing these things about TikTok that are absolutely not true. There is definitely political content on TikTok.

Here's a few with > 100k likes from a minute of searching "Immigration": https://www.tiktok.com/@janetwthehazeleyes/video/69415659895... https://www.tiktok.com/@attorneyericprice/video/691993902413...

"Gun control" https://www.tiktok.com/@feministmama/video/69619490520616174...

I keep seeing "facts" about TikTok posted on HN threads about it that don't hold up to basic research. It's so bizarre.

Idk, I've never opened tiktok. I'm reacting to people's comments.

My point exactly.

>TikTok is a social network that could not be made by an American company, due to its complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship.

Huh? Are you just going to ignore Vine? Twitter completely screwed the pooch on Vine by not paying creators which drove many high profile influencers to move to Instagram. To attribute TikTok’s success to censorship is to eagerly insert your own political bias into their story. Regardless TikTok, née Musica.ly had already started gaining steam as an American company without any major decision on whether to participate in culture wars

> Twitter completely screwed the pooch on Vine

All of the complaints about Google's shuttered apps pale in comparison to this one.

Vine had the best community of any of the major apps, back then, and arguably even now.

I understand they had trouble monitizing it, but it had a strong, vibrant community, even when they shut it down. If they hadn't neglected it for so long and iterated on the concept, they could have easily been TikTok today.

TikTok is un-american because of their complete disregard for free speech. Ehat you are talking about has nothing to so with what I said.

American companies can censor, they do it all the time. Free speech is protection of speech from prosecution by the government, not corporations.

If companies replace roles of the government, then this limitation no longer applies.

American companies booted their own head of state off their platforms. Careful you don't drown in all that freedom.

> TikTok is a social network that could not be made by an American company, due to its complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship.

This is nonsense. All the social networks have things they will remove and ban your account for, from spam and CP upwards (Instagram and FB being notoriously touchy about sexuality). It seems that TikTok is heavier about politics than most, but censorship is not a boolean.

TikTok removes or makes it much harder to find content they do not want on the platform. Things that are not the right tone. There is very little political and culture war crap on it. They don't just censor for abusive, CP, spam and so on.

> There is very little political and culture war crap on it

That all depends on what kind of content you engage with. There is plenty of "political and culture war" type content on TikTok. You probably just don't see it.

Both could be true - i.e. that there is that sort of content there and you will find it if you engage with that stuff ... and that there is notably less of it that on other services.

Any individuals exposure to one of these large networks is a tiny, tiny fraction of what is there.

Huh? Major american social networks are highly censored. From the diversity of political opinions I see on TikTok, it certainly doesn't seem to be any more censored than say Twitter.

(Exception: TikTok does not allow explicitly sexual content, whereas twitter does. But facebook and instagram don't.)

They are not as censored as TikTok and they had to be strong armed into doing it.

this is a strange comment.

are US social media comments bound by free speech laws? don't they all remove content arbitrarily just like tiktok?

how is this the top comment? lol. not to mention Vine was literally the same thing as tiktok - it had terrible execution and quickly died.

Facebook content moderation is not even remotely arbitrary.

Ironic since your ex POTUS got banned from your own social media on grounds of causing civil unrest.

You know every company has to comply with regional laws: twitter got banned from that one African country, that doesn't mean twitter is against free speech. Tiktok has to comply with US laws to be able to enter the US market, and it also hires a bunch of US workers.

Your sinophobia is not welcome on this website.

I think you’re not really grasping how much TikTok “curates” the content on the platform compared to everyone else. Having posts removed seems to be a very common occurrence - I’ve never had a single post of mine removed from any social platform in two decades.

I have no idea what you are talking about or how it is sinophobia.

> I suspect any future social network much like TikTok will have exclusion as a major feature.

Do you mean like Clubhouse?

Anecdotally, clubhouse rooms were higher quality before they allowed Android users into the platform. Not saying that there's something inherently wrong with android users, there's just a higher noise to signal ratio now.

Probably because the first users were naturally more selected and targeted. Opening up to more people, regardless of their phone, inevitably leads to a noiser experience indeed.

Exclusion by driving away users for being complete dog shit is not what I had in mind. Not a recipe for success. I guess I should have put "any future successful social network".

Doesn't facebook, twitter, and other networks have a lot of censorship?

I tend to disagree, it's successful despite it's complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship. If the content is good enough people really don't care.

The content is good because they surgically remove the bad.

Then how do you explain the huge success of League of Legends and Valorant? They have some of the most intrusive anti-cheat in the planet, are Chinese based, and are HUGELY popular specifically in NA.

Again, when the features are good enough, people really don't care.

Sorry I have no idea what you mean

How is tiktok more exclusive?

Not sure if sarcastic. Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are all heavily engaging in censorship. For example, they banned people last year for talking about the lab leak hypothesis, which is now acceptably mainstream(1). They are currently censoring a Youtube channel(2) run by a PhD in biology, who has been interviewing MDs and the inventor of mRNA vaccines, and whose stated purpose is to help end the pandemic(3).

1) https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?t=170 (Jon Stewart on Colbert earlier this week)

2) https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1405234596820643840

3) https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1404474243128037378

It’s also becoming a Chinese state owned company

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