By Alex Shukri

As a fully signed up member of Gen Z, I cannot remember a time that technology has not been a part of my life. My generation are ‘digital natives’ — we grew up with social media apps like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

We’ve seen the rise and fall of apps that we thought would be around forever, like Myspace and Vine. When Vine died in 2017, Musical.ly, a Chinese-owned lip-sync music video app, was already gaining traction. That very same year, Musical.ly was acquired by the mammoth Chinese multinational media/tech company ByteDance, TikTok’s owner. Thus, rising from the ashes of Musical.ly like a phoenix, TikTok has transformed to become one of the biggest platforms for original video content. 

But there was initially some uneasiness about the app. People knew that TikTok came from Musical.ly, and there was a stigma surrounding it as the cringe lip-synching app. Yet, over the last three years, TikTok has completely rebranded itself. This was ByteDance’s dream come true - a separate app from any other app that came before it, even Musical.ly. And to keep their dream intact, they developed a secret weapon: TikTok’s algorithm. 

The infamous algorithm, like that on every other social app, understands what content you interact with the most, down to the phrases that appear in the videos you watch. The more you comment, like, and watch, the more personalised your ‘For You’ page is. And while this is convenient, there is a much darker side to the algorithm: Shadowbanning. Shadowbanning is not an unfamiliar process to social media users, but the very term itself has become more widespread thanks to TikTok. When a creator is shadowbanned, their videos - unknown to them - aren’t on the ‘For You’ page for weeks on end and sometimes not even shown to their followers. Shadowbanning can come from violating community guidelines, spamming, or being inappropriate, but creators can also be shadowbanned for speaking out against the government. Any government. 

One such creator, under the username @DrDaddyIssues, experienced this type of silencing. He believes his videos became shadowbanned once he started speaking in support of the Hong Kong protests, against the detention camps in China, and continuously throughout his support for protesters around the world. He is not alone with this - many creators have voiced their concerns about being silenced by TikTok. It seems that creators who post inappropriate content but are very popular aren’t taken down, but creators that speak out against police brutality have their accounts shadowbanned for weeks.

It appears that even the mentioning of the LGBTQ+ community, mental health, or even some nationalities can be shadowbanned, even though there is nowhere in TikTok’s community guidelines that say politics or the LGBTQ+ community or anything in that genre is banned. The guidelines state that no hate speech, endorsement of violence, or criminal activity is allowed, which leads to the frustration many have when creators try to use their platform for discussion of civil rights or social justice and they get shadowbanned. This is a much bigger issue than a few creators being silenced. 

TikTok, in the developer’s eyes, wasn't created for sharing news but in my generation, where established mainstream news companies don’t always tell the stories we want to know about, we make do wherever we can. 

We as Gen Z’s get our news from social media - like Twitter - and are encouraged to do our own research because of our distrust in typical news sources. In the current reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement, protesters have taken to TikTok and Twitter to speak out and share their stories that the news isn’t covering. Unfortunately, a lot of these creators have been shadowbanned, and if they’re black, they’ve already had an even harder time getting their voices heard.

 At the end of 2019, TikTok acknowledged that its algorithm suppressed videos from disabled, queer, and overweight creators. TikTok’s aim had been to create a set of policies that suppressed the reach of content created by users assumed to be “vulnerable to cyberbullying.” It was not, TikTok said, meant to be a long-term solution. 

No matter how personalised TikTok’s algorithm might be, it appears that viewers have to work harder to see diversity and representation on the ‘For You’ page. Because of this, creators across the app took part in a “Blackout” in early June that promoted black creators on the app to finally get their due recognition. And more recently, with the crisis in Yemen coming to light once more, creators appear to have been shadowbanned when speaking about the famine. 

For its part, TikTok says it has become a platform for social activism at a time when rivals like Facebook are accused of being against it. “Activism is welcome on the platform,” said Stuart Flint, head of Europe, global business solutions, at a TikTok event last week. “The Black Lives Matter hashtag is trending with more than 12.2 billion views.”

However the case may be, there are some ways to avoid a shadowban. A unique way to spread the news is to start the video like a “regular” TikTok clip with some catchy song and then shift into discussing what’s happening in the news or otherwise. 

While the algorithm can be a helpful tool to curate a personalised ‘For You’ page, the darker side can suppress creators who want to speak out against injustices that seem to be dropped after one news cycle.