TikTok loosens grip on political speech for Black Lives Matter
- The video-sharing app updated its community guidelines to provide exceptions for videos that are educational, historical, newsworthy, or otherwise aim to raise awareness about issues
- Videos with the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on TikTok have surpassed 10 billion views
In a massively popular clip on the video-sharing app TikTok, police snipers atop a Minneapolis police station point their guns at Black Lives Matter protesters. Demonstrators fight tear gas, sirens blare and helicopters fly overhead. The footage is set to “This is America“, Donald Glover’s anthem about race and gun violence.
The video became one of the top clips on TikTok’s #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, and drew more than 43 million views. Its popularity shocked the video’s creator, a 33-year-old comedian named Kareem Rahma. “I’m not an activist,” Rahma said. “I joined TikTok to make funny videos, but when my hometown of Minneapolis turned into a war zone I needed to show people.”
TikTok’s decision to chart a different course was deliberate. Many American tech companies have preached a flavour of free speech absolutism since their founding, compromising only as difficult content moderation questions became public relations disasters. TikTok is different. It has regularly made a practice of removing posts that did not fit its carefully crafted carefree image, or reducing their views even if it did leave them up.
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Mourners pay respects at George Floyd's Houston funeral
Some of the company’s early guidance on content moderation limited the reach of posts from overweight, queer or disabled users, according to documents obtained by The Guardian. Another early rule banned “highly controversial topics”, such as separatism or ethnic conflict. TikTok has said it has discontinued these practices.