Tik Tok banned Perez Hilton, reports Taylor Lorenz, and it plainly did so because the site's younger, more popular influencers demanded it.
The ban set off alarm bells because influencer fans had been pushing for it — and young creators celebrated it. "I don't know, Perez, maybe it's time for you to just go to Facebook or something," said Tatayanna Mitchell, a TikToker with 4.5 million followers, in a TikTok video she posted on Sunday.
"I think it was a good decision for him to be banned," said Grace Honeycutt, 17, a TikToker with nearly 20,000 followers. "He used his platform to just throw around drama which was not a good thing to use his platform for."
"Frankly, this is pretty disturbing to me," Ben Goggin, a digital culture editor at Insider, tweeted on Saturday.
No, let them have their unsafe space.
Tik Tok's culture of conformist narcissism is awful and basically evil, but the idea that Tik Tok is some kind of public square that has to respect free speech is worse. It would be nice if Tik Tok had reasonable policies, fairly enforced, but it will never have those things because it's Tik Tok. It is the Attention Hunger Games and the policy team are the Games Masters, optimizing away things that disrupt Tik Tok's ecology of supply. In this ecology, a presence like Hilton is particularly draining because its intended outcome is context collapse; he is a wormhole to the outer darkness of other media, the worst possible thing to be on Tik Tok.
