In various social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, one of the topics that is high on trend lists and in various searches is the protests in Hong Kong against Chinese influence.
But on the Tiktok app, which is currently one of the world's most popular and owned by the Chinese parent company Bytedance, it is harder to find any criticism of China. In the version used by Swedish mobile consumers there are such videos. But they are not as easy to find compared to uncontroversial dance videos. The same with clips that, for example, is about the 30th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
When SVT's correspondent in China does a search on Hong Kong and protests or Free Hong Kong in the Chinese version Douyin, there will be no hits at all. Instead, various propaganda elements with a Chinese perspective on the protests emerge.
Deletes clips
Bytedance has communicated during the fall that the company is not under the influence of the Chinese government. At the same time, at the end of September, The Guardian magazine was able to publish information from documents they had taken out showing how Bytedance's management instructs the company's 10,000 moderators to censor videos that mention, among other things, Tiananmen Square, independent of Tibet or the religious group Falun Gong. According to the documents, there are two categories of prohibited material. Partly those that are a "violation" and that are deleted and partly those that are uploaded but where the distribution through the company's algorithm-controlled content is limited.
According to Tiktok, the documents from which The Guardian took note of rules this spring and the company have since updated their moderation rules. Exactly how the new ones look does not go into the company, but according to Bytedance, the control is now more locally adapted.