Comment by sosomoxie
9 hours ago
What words were China filtering? I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.
9 hours ago
What words were China filtering? I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.
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.
> 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.
>> 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.
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 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..
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.
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