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TikTok eliminating censorship?
According to The New York Times, TikTok has disabled the ability to search for specific hashtags under its Creative Center features, limiting your ability to learn about the popularity of certain topics.
The platform’s Creative Center capabilities let you delve deeper into different usage trends, which can be quite useful for campaign planning. However, according to the New York Times, the application has removed the hashtag search feature because of worries that the data was being used to indicate potential platform censorship.
NYT says:
“The company’s critics had harnessed the tool to argue that the application, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, fails to adequately moderate content on the app and that Beijing influences the posts that appear on it.”
This image (from 2022) shows that there used to be a magnifying glass search option at the upper right of the listing.
That has already been removed, with the application stating to the NYT that the tool is now only dedicated to sharing data on the top 100 hashtags across various businesses.
Surprise?
You’re right, the update is not very surprising.
TikTok has long maintained that it is not a forum for political discussion, as it seeks to distance itself from heated debate and additional investigation into its ties to the Chinese government. Various reports have suggested that the CCP has a special interest in TikTok, particularly the local Chinese version of the app, but TikTok, which is still facing a potential ban in the United States due to geopolitical tensions, has logically sought to downplay and avoid any such associations wherever possible.
However, this could be considered an act of censorship.
While TikTok claims that removing hashtag search from this part will keep things more consistent with the tool’s market research purpose, some think that TikTok is just aiming to halt research into user activity, restricting future examination of the app.
Which is true, but there is also a reasonable argument about the purpose of this tool, depending on how you look at it.
In any case, for marketers, it removes one search feature from TikTok’s Creative Center features, but there are still numerous other research choices that are really useful for analysis.
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