TikTok Explicitly Bans Misgendering, Deadnaming, Promotion of Conversion Therapy | Hacker News Reader

TikTok Explicitly Bans Misgendering, Deadnaming, Promotion of Conversion Therapy

variety.com

18 pointsnickthegreek68 comments

Remember, no referring to Meta Inc. as "Facebook"!

While I think that everybody should be treated with respect, policing this via censorship is dangerous. You can't legislate away hate, as I found out when I realised that the USA is still a racist in many, many places even though the Civil Rights Act was passed over 50 years ago.

This isn't legislation, though. It's a private company deciding they don't want to facilitate some speech. Now I agree that there should be some level of compelled speech from private platforms, but I don't think we need to force them to amplify such things.

I'm personally of the opinion that if a private social platform bills itself as a digital town square and has ambitions of becoming a monopoly (or a part of an oligopoly), then it should be treated exactly as if it was state-owned.

If 20% of your potential audience can be taken away by the flip of a switch (or worse, an automated algorithm with no real oversight), then it really doesn't matter who's doing the taking away. The harm is the same.

Does tiktok even bill itself as a digital town square?

Also, if you've ever had the misfortune of helping run a forum, you would know that this isn't really workable. Without proactive moderation that goes above and beyond the bare legal minimum, a tiny minority of individuals will just take over the space and completely ruin it for everyone.

There has to be some moderation beyond that the government does to public spaces. At the same time, I don't want people to be functionally excluded from society purely for their political opinions not least of which because I believe people can change. There has to be an equilibrium, and I think that purposefully harassing minorities should be outside of that equilibrium.

> Also, if you've ever had the misfortune of helping run a forum, you would know that this isn't really workable. (...) a tiny minority of individuals will just take over the space and completely ruin it for everyone.

I've seen this happen, but forums never had the universal user base that modern social media companies do. If you get banned from a forum, you get cut off from maybe 500 members of your target audience. If the same happens with a social media platform, you lose access to hundreds of thousands or even millions of members. The impact of the ban is disproportionate, except in the cases of the most extreme speech (like calling for literal heads to roll, for instance).

Kicking off 20% of your userbase doesn't sound like a terribly effective strategy to attaining a monopoly. But, I'm interested in this notion that it should be "treated exactly as if it was state-owned." For HN, this sounds like a bracingly anticapitalist stance. Should companies beyond a certain size be subject to imminent domain? Do we seize Bezos's stock?

Apologies, I should have qualified this as "treated exactly as if state-owned for the purposes of establishing what kinds of speech should be allowed". I am not advocating for nationalisation of private enterprise, but merely for ensuring that they are bound by the same standards when they reach the same size.

You can still get kicked out of a public library for yelling at other patrons. Or, say, following people around and muttering racial slurs. Should we treat it like the postal service, where breaking the rules is a felony?

> It's a private company deciding they don't want to facilitate some speech.

Is it a private company? How much control does the CCP need to have over it before it's recognized as an arm of the state.

Even this platform there are policies on what to do/write and how to behave. Up/downvoting is a way of policy management.

Neither policing nor legislation, if you don't like it, you can join one of several social media platforms that allows all this stuff.

Right, like Parler or 4chan.

Yes, that's what invariably happens when your standard for moderation is bare legality.

I think it's more about the pseudonymity of internet culture and the interactions it tends to fosters. eg: I am responding to you without knowing you personally and the only relationship I have with you is your username and the broader HN message board; the freedom to be critical without human 1:1 feedback.

There is a lot of space in between Tiktok's current policy and allowing literally anything that's legal. It doesn't have to be a binary choice between chaos and strict policing.

Ironically, Parler is extremely heavily censored, far more than Twitter - it is verbatim the censorship regime that conservatives pretend exists elsewhere, only actually existing yet in their favor

When someone/something gets associated with Parler, 4chan or Gab, it loses a lot of legitimacy with the mainstream. That's why conservatives are fighting to not be relegated to such corners of the internet, but instead allow to eat off the legitimacy and reach of mainstream platforms like TikTok and Youtube.

Why would anyone consider Tiktok or YouTube to be legitimate or illegitimate in any measure? They are literally just places where all kinds of people upload all kinds of content. That the platform carries a certain video, doesn't mean it has some stamp of approval.

Because they are well known platforms that plenty of media personalities have careers on. When a person sees that a podcast is hosted on www.1776GeneralLeeDidNothingWrong.com, they are going to automatically turn up their noses and walk away. Youtube and TikTok don't incur such baggage. There is a reason that conservative personalities screech everytime they are given the boot from these platforms.

And yet you could only get real data re: the potential COVID Lab leak from 4Chan for quite awhile. It was deemed misinformation and bad for our health to read. Maybe censorship is what is actually "problematic"..

There was no hard censorship of the lab leak theory. It was posted everywhere, including here on HN I'm sure.

>there was no hard censorship

Interesting choice of words..

Just a small anecdote, one of the first times Reddit did a mass banning of subreddits there was a public outcry that to me, uninformed at the time, seemed reasonable. The creators of Voat assured they'd never adopt such a policy. If you know anything about Voat's history, you know how it ended up. I couldn't just ignore the slurs on the front page of the website. Back on Reddit, the mythical day where they came for the things I love would never come. Ever since, I've found free speech is much easier for websites than people pretend. By removing bad posts, the only lasting implication is discouraging more bad posts. Easy.

"You can't legislate away hate" does not imply "you shouldn't try". The Civil Rights Act was a positive development, despite failing to "solve" racism.

> While I think that everybody should be treated with respect, policing this via censorship is dangerous. You can't legislate away hate

Private actors implementing policies for what they will use their resources to relay isn't legislation, so what you can and cannot legislate is immaterial (except as indication that to succeed, non-legislative approaches like this are necessary.) Nor is it necessarily targeting (at least as the immediate goal, though for some actors it might be part of a broader strategy with that as the ultimate goal) eliminating hate, it is targeting not being (or, more cynically, not being seen as) an active collaborator in it.

How to avoid deadnaming in some contexts isn't really clear. How do you talk about historical events where a trans person's original name was recorded?

For instance, nobody is retroactively editing a movie's credits to use their new name. Nobody is re-engraving trophies that had their original name engraved.

The policy seems to universally be "you're evil if you deadname in any context, period", which seems logically impossible to satisfy in some contexts.

Always use their new name. Consider if you were talking about someone who recently got married - would you refer to them as "Miss XYZ" when talking about a month ago but when talking in the present use their current name "Mrs. ABC"? Same thing.

> Always use their new name. Consider if you were talking about someone who recently got married

So if I'm reading the text of a plaque awarded prior to a transition (or text from a history book describing a person prior to transition, etc.), you're saying that I should not read it verbatim but that I should be substituting in their new name on the fly?

Also, I don't see how it's the same thing as changing your name after getting married. Deadnaming has social consequences like getting you banned from Twitter, using a maiden name will not.

I mean yes, if you want to not be rude, that'd be nice! It's not a Law, just like repeatedly shouting in a movie theater and making cell phone calls isn't a Law, but people sure aren't gonna like it when you do it.

Thanks for explaining your view on the issue. I think it's unnecessarily confusing in some corner cases, but etiquette is rarely perfectly coherent or well defined in all cases. We muddle through all the same as long as we're all being charitable.

Considering TikTok is owned by a Chinese company and China has it's own version of TikTok, are these new updated rules reflect in the Chinese TikTok?

I wonder if China's FP plays into it at all. In the same way that Russia has tried to foment cultural unrest in the United states by promoting far left & far right groups.

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