Content on TikTok frequently has images blurred out, presumably so they won't get flagged and removed by the moderators. These images surely are the worst things imaginable, shocking to our humanity: violence (usually fake violence from TV or movies), guns (usually fake guns from TV or movies), and… cigarettes (sometimes real, sometimes fake from TV or movies.).
And yet…overtly Nazi themed content? Oh, that's a-ok. Unless those Nazi's are smoking, I suppose. Otherwise, have at it.
This piece in Wired looks at a side of TikTok that most of us don't see — the algorithm doesn't push this shit to us so we're unaware it exists.
Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are sharing Hitler-related propaganda and trying to recruit new members on TikTok, according to a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD)… The TikTok algorithm is also promoting this content to new users, researchers found, as extremist communities are leveraging the huge popularity of TikTok among younger audiences to spread their message.
Fabulous. Of course, TikTok claims they're trying to clamp down on this kind of stuff, but these fascist assholes are finding ways to skirt the moderators.
Part of the reason platforms like TikTok have in the past been unable to effectively clamp down on extremist content is due to the use of code language, emojis, acronyms, and numbers by these groups. For example, many of the neo-Nazi accounts used a juice box emoji to refer to Jewish people.
Bad news: lots of Nazi imagery and propaganda is flowing freely on social media. But the good news: we don't have to suffer anything as profoundly upsetting as seeing people smoke. Thanks, TikTok.
