Tic knock cracked down on non-QA-related content, in line with similar moves by other major social media companies, including Facebook and YouTube, which focus on reducing the spread of baseless conspiracy theory on their respective platforms. According to an NPR report this weekend, TikTok had quietly banned several hashtags associated with the QAnon conspiracy and claims it will also delete the accounts of users promoting QAnon's content.
Tiktok tells us, however, that these policies are not new. The company says they actually hit the books earlier this year.
TikTok had initially focused on reducing discoverability as an immediate step by blocking search results while examining, with the help of partners, how such content manifested on its platform. This was covered in several news publications in July, TikTok said. In August, TikTok also established a policy to remove content and ban accounts, we are told.
Despite the policies, a report this month from Media Matters documented that TikTok still hosted at least 14 unaffiliated QA hashtags with over 488 million collective views. This happened because the platform had not yet addressed how QAnon followers were bypassing community restrictions using variations and spelling errors.
Following the Media Matters report, TikTok removed 11 of the 14 hashtags it referred to, the report noted in an update.
Today, a number of hashtags unrelated to QAnon, such as #QAnon, #TheStormIsComing, # Trump2Q2Q, and others are not returning results in TikTok's search engine. They do not appear in the "Top" section of the search results, nor in "Videos" or "Hashtags".
Instead of showing users a blank page when they search for these terms, TikTok displays a message explaining how certain phrases can be associated with behavior or content that violates the TikTok Community Guidelines and offers a link to that resource.
Media Matters praised the changes in a statement to NPR as something TikTok was doing that was "good and meaningful" albeit "long overdue".
While the TikTok ban addressed many of the major search results and tags associated with the conspiracy, we found it overlooked others, such as Pizzagate and WWG1WGA, for example. In testing this afternoon, these terms and many others still returned a lot of content.
TikTok claims that what we saw was probably "a bug".
Today we reached out to TikTok to ask why searches for terms like "pizzagate" and "WWG1WGA" - popular QAnon terms - still returned search results, even though their hashtags were banned.
For example, if you just searched for "pizzagate", TikTok offered a long list of videos to scroll through, although I couldn't go directly to its hashtag. This was not the case with the other banned hashtags (such as #QAnon) at the time of our tests.
The returned videos discussed the Pizzagate conspiracy, a baseless conspiracy theory that ultimately led to real-world violence when a gunman shot a DC pizza company, thinking he was there to save trapped children.
While some videos were just discussing or debunking the idea, many were seriously promoting the pizzagata conspiracy, even posting that it was "real" or claimed to offer "proof".
Above: Video recorded Oct 19, 2020, 3:47 PM ET / 12:47 PM PTOther hashtags not associated with QA were also not subject to a total ban, including WWG1WGA, WGA, ThesePeopleAreSick, cannibalclub, hollyweird, and many others often used to circulate QAnon conspiracies.
When we searched for these terms, we found longer lists of non-QA related videos to scroll through.
We documented this with photos and videos before contacting TikTok to ask why exceptions to the ban were made. We specifically asked what the two main terms were: Pizzagate and WWG1WGA.
TikTok has provided us with information on the timing of changes to its policies and the following statement:
"Content and accounts that promote QAnon violate our disinformation policy and we remove it from our platform. We have also taken significant steps to make this content more difficult to find in search and hashtags by redirecting terms associated with our Community Guidelines. We continually update our warranties with misspellings and new phrases as we work to keep TikTok a safe and authentic place for our community. "
TikTok also said that the search term blocker must have been a bug, because it now works correctly.
We found that after receiving confirmation from TikTok, the terms we asked for were blocked, but others were not. This includes some of the ones mentioned above, as well as bizarre terms that only a true conspiracy fan would know, such as adrenochromereptilians.
We asked Media Matters if it could still praise TikTok's actions to ban QAnon content, given what, at the time, appeared to be a loophole in the QAnon ban.
"TikTok obviously took action but didn't completely fix the problem, but as we noted, the real test of any of these policies - as we've said of other platforms' measures - is in how and if they apply them," the said. organization.
Even though the banned content was only showing today due to a "bug," we found that many of the users who posted the content didn't actually banned it from TikTok, apparently.
While searching for their username will return no results now that the ban is no longer buggy, you can still go directly to these users' profile pages via their profile URL on the web.
We tested it on many profiles who had posted QAnon content or used banned terms in hashtags and descriptions of their videos. (Here are some examples.)
This means that although TikTok has reduced the discoverability of these users in the app, accounts can still be discovered if you know their username. And once you get to the account page, you can still follow them.
These examples of "bugs" or simply oversights indicate how difficult it is to enforce content bans on social media platforms.
Without substantial investment in human restraint combined with automation, as well as tools that ensure banned users can't return, it's hard to keep up with the spread of social media-scale disinformation.
