Tiktok's internal policies are both weird and terrible

Tiktok bills itself as apolitical, despite the fact that is both a de facto arm of Chinese political propaganda (and, weirdly, for Uyghur human rights activists).

Tiktok's internal moderation policies are an unknowable mess (as you'd expect from any for-profit entity that hopes to establish physical sales offices in authoritarian states around the world and doesn't want their in-country execs to be marched off to jail at gunpoint). Leaks have shown how the guidelines in China are used to suppress political dissidence, and also how the company has weird and nonsensical definitions of the sexual exploitation of children, and how the company avoids controversy by banning criticism of world leaders, or mentions of sectarian or religious conflicts.

But fresh leaks reveal that Tiktok's national guidelines outside of China are also bizarre and terrible: in Turkey, the company banned LGBT-related content, as well as cleavage, discussions of sanitary pads, and (naturally) pro-Kurdish material -- as well as criticism of the ruling party, depictions of alcohol, or non-Islamic religious content.

Contradictory, secretive, overbroad moderation rules are par for the course in the online world -- Tiktok's rules are different, but not necessarily worse, than the rules used by Facebook or Apple.

However, Tiktok is different from most other services in one respect: it is atemporal. Posts do not have timestamps, and it's nearly impossible to figure out how old a post is. On the plus side, this means that older, dormant posts can go suddenly viral (Tiktok is also unique in that its recommendation algorithms can elevate material posted from accounts with very few followers, making overnight sensations out of obscure users. Read the rest