Thursday August 4, 2022, "20 Minutes" uploaded a video on TikTok from its certified account to explain the tensions between China and the United States during Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island.
The day after its publication, this educational content was suspended by the platform for nearly 24 hours, TikTok evoking a “challenging received” for the following “reason for violation”: “Integrity and authenticity”.
This unprecedented incident for our editorial staff occurring in a particular geopolitical context, and knowing the proximity between TikTok and the Beijing government, we sought to understand what happened.
On Thursday August 4, 2022,
20 Minutes
posted via its certified account an educational video on TikTok about the tensions between the United States and China around Taiwan, on the occasion of Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island.
This video was suspended for almost 24 hours, between Friday August 5th and Saturday August 6th.
Difficult to be more precise, because the editorial staff was not notified at the time of its suspension, nor when it was put back online.
Given the proximity between TikTok and China, this incident, which occurred at a time of strong international tension, challenged us and we sought to understand what happened.
Excessive censorship?
According to the message displayed in place of the video and only visible from our account during this period of time, it was a question of a "dispute received" with the following "reason for violation": "Integrity and authenticity", under hearing that our production - produced, proofread and validated by a team of professional journalists - could have been intended to "deceive or mislead" TikTok users.
Obviously, we are not perfect and we could have made all kinds of mistakes in the video in question.
But after several checks, we did not find any.
This censorship therefore seemed abusive to us, and we contacted TikTok by email to find out the reasons.
Verification of information
After a week, the TikTok teams answered our questions about how moderation works, community rules and the specific case of our video on Taiwan.
They thus reminded us of the interest of moderation and its general principle which is not surprising and which would apply “to all content and users, without exception”.
On the operation, TikTok explains to us “enforce these rules proactively, that is to say even before content (…) is reported, using both technology and human moderation”.
TikTok also specifies working with partner media, such as Agence France Presse in France, to verify the information circulating on its platform.
The social network adds: "any content that is being verified, or that could not be corroborated, is ineligible for the "For You" feed", i.e. the feed in which users can see the videos. posted by accounts to which they are not subscribed, based on choices made by an algorithm.
A first for
20 Minutes
According to TikTok, that's "exactly what happened" for our Taiwan video.
But on our side, we found that during the review of our production, we could not, nor our subscribers, see the video, even by going directly to our profile.
We had never faced such a situation and this extensive verification procedure focused on a video dealing with a sensitive subject for Beijing, which was then in the midst of a military maneuver around Taiwan.
Amazing?
On this point, TikTok did not provide us with an explanation…
Previous
As it stands, there is no evidence that the platform wanted to censor our information work, but precedents exist.
In 2019, Ferora Aziz, a 17-year-old American girl, had her account deleted after the publication of a video that went viral denouncing the massacre of Uyghurs in China.
The social network then defended itself from any censorship, arguing that the sanctions taken against the teenager were linked to another video.
Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, is headquartered in Beijing.
On the Chinese Web, Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, leaves no room for challenging the regime in place.
If TikTok and Douyin operate separately, the hypothesis that the censorship methods of one are punctually applied by the other seems plausible.
In any case, this misadventure has the merit of reminding us that TikTok, like other social networks, are private companies, which pursue, using often opaque algorithms, their own economic and political interests.
Which can sometimes diverge from those of their users.
high tech
Facebook is now used by only a third of American teens, according to a study
high tech
TikTok: US senators call for data security investigation
Taiwan
TikTok
China
Censorship
Social networks
Internet
20 minute video