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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

On Twitter, there's a bunch of reports that TikTok suddenly prevents people from sending the word "Epstein" in DMs [1].

I had expected an Orbanisation (aka, what happened to the media sphere in Hungary after Orban took over and his cronies bought up almost all media) of Tiktok, but not that fast, it's like less than a week after the deal [2].

Scary shit if you ask me, and it's made scarier by the fact that Tiktok has already been changing the way our youth speaks due to evading censorship (e.g. "graped" instead of "raped", "unalived" instead of kill/murder/execute/suicide).

[1] https://x.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/23/heres-whats-you-should-kno...

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> but not that fast

Why not? All the tech was already put in place by China. All that the U.S. had to do was change the filtered words.

I had expected a longer "cooldown" time so that people don't immediately jump to the conclusion that the forced TikTok sale was to suppress discussion of the Epstein files.

No, the forced bipartisan support TikTok sale was to suppress discussion of Palestine.

It’s so blatant, it’s more like trolling at this point.

What words were China filtering? I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.

On WeChat lots of things are censored, almost keyword based. E.g. a building collapses, you want to talk about it to your friends, your message can't be sent because it'll be deemed to be trying to cause social unrest..

Duoyin (Chinese version of TikTok) would definitely not be different..

Enough of them to give rise to the term "algospeak" which means using words like "unalive" in place of "kill" to avoid automated censorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algospeak

Meanwhile you can report a bot who's posted 20+ comments under a video to advertise illegal drugs and all of the reports and subsequent appeals will consistently come back as "No violation found".

This has been happening for 10+ years on e.g. YouTube, you can't say certain words in the video or mention them in the title or you get demonetized. Nothing to do with China.

>> All the tech was already put in place by China. All that the U.S. had to do was change the filtered words.

> I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.

> you can't say certain words in the video or mention them in the title or you get demonetized

That's not censorship problems.

That's advertisement problems. That's conflicts of interest problems. That's incentives problems. That's people-who-post-videos-just-to-make-money problems.

Well, okay, it can easily be turned into censorship problems: instead of just demonetizing the video, don't show it to anyone. It's quite a fine line, but the line is indeed there.

The Chinese one is to do with China, the American one is to do with America.

Does "kill" have some type of salient political valence that I'm not aware of?

This seems like a fairly blunt attempt at quality-of-life improvement for the general platform vibes, no? Put some friction on the (legitimate) nutjobs who just want to say "Kill X, kill Y" all the time and are so insane they can't figure out euphemisms?

On WeChat and Douyin (chinese tiktok), good luck mentioning things like:

the cultural revolution famine the great leap forward Taiwanese independence Hong Kong self governance democracy human rights Falun Gong Uyghur people free speech KMT party Chiang Kai-shek

and that's just off the top of my head. there are likely hundreds of others.

But did this apply to the US version of TikTok? We now have imposed censorship in the US app, that as far as I'm aware did not exist at all when it was owned by China.

> did this this apply to the US version of TikTok?

Yup. China doesn't want you to know about Chinese problems or history, like Tianenmen Square.

> as far as I'm aware did not exist at all when it was owned by China.

Then either you weren't paying attention or the filters were working against you as intended.

You say yes, but do you have any evidence to back that up? I’ve never seen any credible reporting suggesting China was censoring any topic on TikTok.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok

But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the Chinese ruling party now"... If it's a slow descent, people might accept the madness (imagine if a bombshell report showed Biden had links to Epstein, sexually assaulted 20+ women, and was moaning about the Nobel Peace Prize to the prime minister of Norway)...

Somehow I'm optimistic that this means the Trump Regime is on its last legs. But well, what's the quote about underestimating the stupidity of the American public?

> But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the Chinese ruling party now"

Yup!

> But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the Chinese ruling party now"

Huh? They clearly are different - they have all the drawbacks with none of the positives.

Yeah, the CCP brought more people out of poverty than any other system including capitalism.

Funny how all the people contesting other adjacent comments are noticeably absent here. It's silly in the first place, given the US government and Israeli officials were very clear in their bluntly stated aims with the tiktok take over, what we're seeing now is just the execution of clearly stated intentions, too many ideologues are in denial.

Also: https://www.the-independent.com/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-ce...

The Epstein situation is .. weird. On the one hand, it's a massive nexus of corruption and abuse. On the other hand, it's just .. evidence. Nobody cares about evidence, they've already decided they want to protect the Trump administration no matter what. Rather like ICE shooting legal gun owner US civilians.

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