TikTok has had several such errors over the past few months, all of which have disproportionately impacted marginalized groups on the platform. She’s active on TikTok, with more than 50,000 followers, but while not everything she sees feels like a legitimate concern she says the app’s regular parade of issues is real. “I probably get tagged in something about once a week,” says Casey Fiesler, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies technology ethics and online communities. Hate speech and talking about hate speech can look very similar to an algorithm.” Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado, Boulder 'Content’s getting flagged because they are someone from a marginalized group who is talking about their experiences with racism. Tyler’s two videos on the Marketplace bios, for example, each have more than 1 million views. But when these companies appear to be breaking their own policies, people often find that the best route forward is simply to try to post about it on the platform itself, in the hope of going viral and getting attention that leads to some kind of resolution. Tiktok, Twitter, and Facebook have made it easier for users to report abuse and rule violations by other users. Getting views has been one of the more effective strategies to push a big platform to fix something for years. People make their videos because they work. It’s not necessarily a surprise that these videos make news. TikTok then releases a statement saying that the problem was the result of an error, and emphases the work they do to support the creators and causes affected. Eventually, perhaps, a journalist gets interested in what’s going on, asks the company to explain, and the issue is fixed.

Then they make a video about what’s going on, and that video gets a lot of views. These are all examples of a pattern that repeats on TikTok: first a creator notices a bizarre and potentially harmful issue with the platform’s moderation or algorithm, one that often disproportionately impacts marginalized groups.

Tiktok archive