In addition to direct censorship, TikTok has also been accused of data collection issues. In 2019, Musical.ly, Inc., which is now known as TikTok, paid $5.7 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that Musical.ly knowingly and willfully collected personal information from children under the age of 13, which they failed to provide notice of, failed to provide any information on how they plan to use that information, failed to get consent from parents, or to honor requests to delete personal information collected, and that they retained that personal information for longer than necessary.
Additionally, TikTok has been accused of using their algorithms to favor and limit specific perspectives. For instance, there is evidence that TikTok has limited visibility of “sensitive content” that the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party would prefer not be widely discussed.
Topics alleged to have been censored by the platform include the Uyghur genocide, Hong Kong protests, the border dispute with India, Chinese allied political leaders like Vladimir Putin, and a wide range of other topics, while pushing content critical of the United States to the fore.
TikTok's public response to these claims have frequently cited “mistakes,” just like Facebook, but TikTok has also claimed the platform was just trying to protect users from bullying by censoring posts by users it identified as disabled, fat or LGBT by limiting their reach.
On November 27, 2019, TikTok suspended the account of a 17-year-old American named Feroza Aziz after she posted a video, which she disguised as a makeup tutorial, about the Xinjiang internment camps. TikTok apologized and claimed that her account, which they then reinstated, had been suspended as a result of "human error".
In July 2020, TikTok suspended the account of Hana Hassan, an 18-year-old Muslim-American from New Jersey, who posted a video on the same topic, and went viral.
In March 2023, during a hearing with TikTok executives, Congresswoman Kat Cammack played a TikTok video of a shooting gun, captioned with the name of the House committee investigating TikTok, along with the exact date of the hearing, posted before the hearing was announced to the public.
“You expect us to believe that you are capable of maintaining the data security, privacy and security of 150 million Americans where you can’t even protect the people in this room?” Cammack asked.
TikTok removed the video and said that they banned the account that posted it. At the same hearing, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew said the company has about 40,000 human moderators in addition to algorithmic flagging.
Leaked documents offered evidence to support reports that Russia and China collaborate on censorship and internet control tactics. Documents and recordings from meetings in 2017 and 2019 between officials from the Chinese and Russian agencies, reported by RFE/RL, show that the allied countries share censorship strategies and practices with each other, including blocking news articles that have been deemed “dangerous.”
In 2023, Amnesty International concluded that the Tiktok algorithm risks easily leading young users down a rabbit holes of harmful content, and that within 20 minutes or less, teen accounts that signalled an interest in mental health content were mostly shown videos that “romanticize and encourage depressive thinking, self-harm and suicide.”
Their report, titled Driven into Darkness: How TikTok’s ‘For You’ Feed Encourages Self-Harm and Suicidal Ideation, suggests that TikTok specifically “risks exacerbating children and young people’s struggles with depression, anxiety and self-harm, putting young people’s mental and physical health at risk.”
“There is self-harm content, there is nonsensical content about cures for mental health…” said Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which produced a report about TikTok titled Deadly by Design.
“The truth is that they are being flooded with content that gives them an extremely distorted view of themselves, their bodies, their mental health, and how they compare to other people,” he added.
The report found that within 2.6 minutes, TikTok recommended suicide content; within 8 minutes, content related to eating disorders; that every 39 seconds, TikTok recommended videos about body image and mental health to teens.
An article in The Multilevel Mailer, “Encouragement of self-diagnosis through tiktok - why it may be more damaging than you'd think”, suggests that there may be worse happening:
“The presence of mass social media-induced illness is also becoming an issue in the TikTok community, as there has been a spontaneous spread of behaviours and conditions due to witnessing the behaviour of those impacted by a particular disorder. A good example would be the sudden increase in teens diagnosing themselves with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) as well as the increase in mysterious tics in teenage girls.”
In 2023, Haltigan et al also published a study in the journal Comprehensive Psychiatry, “Social media as an incubator of personality and behavioral psychopathology: Symptom and disorder authenticity or psychosomatic social contagion?” which suggests,
“…algorithmic social media platforms may serve as a vehicle of transmission for social contagion of self-diagnosed mental illness conditions.”
Much of the content varieties pushed to teens in western countries is banned outright in countries like China and Russia, which have their own versions of the TikTok app.
Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom, launched a TikTok like platform named “Yappy,” and Douyin is the Chinese variant of the TikTok app that ByteDance, which is based in Beijing, produces especially for China.
Douyin also has an older user base than TikTok, and “now contains micro-vlogs, life-style content, business advice, and videos from local police.”
Leaked documents obtained by the UK’s Guardian confirm that Bytedance censors content on its app in line with Beijing’s priorities, just like any other major China-based social media company.
The guidelines divide banned material into two categories: some content is marked as a “violation”, which sees it deleted from the site entirely, and can lead to a user being banned from the service. But lesser infringements are marked as “visible to self”, which leaves the content up but limits its distribution through TikTok’s algorithmically-curated feed.
This latter enforcement technique means that it can be unclear to users whether they have posted infringing content, or if their post simply has not been deemed compelling enough to be shared widely by the notoriously unpredictable algorithm.
The bulk of the guidelines covering China are contained in a section governing “hate speech and religion”.
On June 29, 2020, the Indian government banned TikTok, along with 58 other Chinese apps, after a conflict between India and China erupted into a border skirmish. The ban was made permanent in January 2021.
President Trump had given a 15 September 2020 deadline for TikTok to sell its US business, or be shut down. The day before that deadline, Microsoft revealed that its offer to buy the company had been rejected. TikTok instead struck a deal with Oracle and Walmart, which fell apart after months of delays and legal challenges turned the issue into a non issue when Trump left office.
TikTok has since made a big effort to oppose such legislation in the United States. Besides sending push notifications urging users to call their congressional representatives to tell them to vote against the bill, the company also has television ads promoting the #KeepTikTok campaign in states like Ohio, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, casting TikTok influencers and merchants in a bid to stress the economic importance of the app.
TikTok is also running ads on outside social media ads to oppose the bill, The New York Times reported, citing the Meta Platforms Ad Library.
On March 13, 2024, The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill, with 352 in favor and 65 opposed, that gives ByteDance the choice to sell TikTok within six months or lose its access to app stores and web-hosting services in the United State. President Biden has said that he would sign such a bill, but it’s unclear when it may come up for discussion in the Senate.
Hopefully this platform will soon be banned & any concerns of “national security risk” and “data collection” will end within the US and other countries and users where it monitors data. Great work!