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TikTok: The video app has blocked a popular channel for the “Hoss und Hopf” podcast

Photo: Pond5 Images / IMAGO

TikTok apparently no longer wants the two podcasters “Hoss and Hopf” on its platform. According to SPIEGEL information, a channel for her podcast, which had around 166,000 followers, was blocked with immediate effect on Wednesday morning. The company said on request that the channel had been removed from the platform “due to dangerous misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories.”

The blocking is permanent and is not directed against individual videos, but against the entire channel, according to company circles. It goes on to say that duplicates of “Hoss and Hopf” videos were also removed from other channels. According to the information, there were at times several dozen fan accounts on the short video platform that independently distributed content from the two podcasters.

Behind “Hoss and Hopf” are Philip Hopf and Kiarash Hossainpour, known as Hoss. You come from the financial scene. Hopf runs a company that sells higher-risk investment strategies to investors. Hossainpour lives in Dubai and became known as a cryptocurrency influencer. Short clips from the duo's podcast, which is played in audio and video format on several platforms, have recently become very popular on TikTok. Hopf and Hossainpour used a competition to motivate their fans to create and upload their own short clips. In their podcast, Hopf and Hossainpour repeatedly share conspiracy theories in addition to their right-wing libertarian worldview.

What TikTok considers dangerous

In principle, it does not automatically lead to a ban on TikTok if users spread false information or conspiracy theories. However, the company's so-called community guidelines state that it tries to "act on the basis of facts and shared reality" and does not allow "inaccurate, misleading or false content that could cause significant harm to individuals or the community." According to TikTok's definition, significant harm can also include “societal harm,” “including threats to fundamental social processes or institutions, such as democratic elections, and processes that maintain public health and public safety.”

Regarding the term “dangerous conspiracy theories,” TikTok writes in its community guidelines that this refers to “conspiracy theories that are violent or hateful, such as calls for violent actions, connections to previous violence, denials of well-documented violent events, or causing prejudice against one Group with a protected property«.

Meanwhile, their content is still available on the Spotify platform, where Hopf and Hossainpour have been regularly at the top of the podcast charts for several weeks. When asked, the streaming service said that the podcast episodes did not violate Spotify's platform rules.

As of Wednesday afternoon, individual short videos about “Hoss und Hopf” can still be found on TikTok, but mostly on smaller channels.

hpp/kko