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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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