TikTok Censored Our Content.

Does It Matter?

TikTok recently censored one of our viral videos.

The video TikTok removed is a clip from a public conversation that took place during our Reverse Q&A university tour. We examined the claim, “Trans women should be legally treated as women” at University of California Berkeley.

At the time of this writing, the complete video has nearly 190,000 views on YouTube, more than 5,700 “likes,” more than 3,700 comments, and it’s been shared widely. Articles about the video have been published on Daily Mail and Not the Bee. Popular feminist podcaster Genevieve Gluck posted a clip on her Women’s Voices Twitter account, and Daily Wire retweeted it. That clip has been viewed over two million times.

In other words, the conversation is receiving a lot of attention. So why did TikTok remove the clip? You can see the vague explanation TikTok provided above: violating “Community Guidelines.”

In the clip TikTok censored, Peter Boghossian questions a female molecular geneticist about her disagreement with the claim, “Trans women should be legally treated as women.” She expresses concern about biological women being housed with trans women in prison, including documented incidents of rape and pregnancy. Based on comments on various platforms, the most popular thing she said was, “It’s so sad that women have internalized misogyny to the point where the man’s comfort takes precedence over the woman’s safety.”

We’ve taken a close look at TikTok’s Community Guidelines, and our best guess is that the comments she expressed were deemed Hateful Behavior under the category of “Attacks and slurs on the basis of protected attributes.”

After TikTok deemed this woman’s concerns to be unsuitable for public consideration, we posted a different clip from the same conversation—comments from a student who agreed with the claim. The student says that while she does see potential concerns with men who identify as women being housed alongside biological women in prisons, “There are currently lots of problems with the legal reform system, so…” This clip remains unmolested by TikTok censors.

The primary mission of our work is to restore free speech and open inquiry as non-partisan values while fostering authentic conversation and epistemic clarity across all segments of society. The deletion of a short video clip on TikTok may not seem like a big deal, but we see it as an assault on expression and discourse.

We understand that TikTok is a private (Chinese) company and has the right to moderate its content as it sees fit, but consider the insidious effect censoring authentic dialogue has on young people in the United States. The latest data shows people under 18 spend an average of 99 minutes per day on the platform. According to TikTok, there are 48 million active users between 16 and 24 years old in the United States. The content they receive is determined appropriate by censors who reject challenges to the dominant narrative, no matter how legitimate or well-considered.

Free speech advocate Elon Musk tweeted this question in June:

I used to believe TikTok was only guilty of shortening attention spans. But things appear to be far worse. By removing content for ideological reasons, TikTok undermines and devalues free speech and open inquiry. Young people passively receive this destructive desideratum every minute they spend on the platform.

This leaves us with a dilemma: Should we continue posting meaningful, thought provoking-content until we get kicked off of the platform, or post “safe” content that will evade the censors in order to remain connected with our TikTok community?  We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Gina Gambony, Director of Content & Production, NPA