IMO TikTok's draw is that it's the anthithesis to American / western social media culture. It's algorithmic bias towards mainstream, playful, feel good content is a byproduct of Chinese style censorship.
What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place. Of course, politics and toxicity exist all over Chinese internet as well, they just get filtered / harmonized over time or never reach many eyes in the first place. It maybe a bad unitary model for governing cyberspace policy for an entire country, but it's has merits when applied to certain audiences / networks and the west should learn from it even if TikTok gets banned.
It's not the "wholesomeness" that's unique to China, but the commitment to maintain that wholesomeness systematically as an platform identity which is a trained requisite for surviving Chinese censorship. The issue with many western media platform is they start off wholesome like TikTok but inevitably reach Eternal September criticality with unconstrained growth. Western moderation philosophy is typically to let this run, eyeballs at all cost, until they're forced to respond incrementally to outside forces. This alienates the masses who don't care for the fringe drama. The Chinese model is preemptively tame the space because censorship board diktat is arbitrary so best to constrain space. This accommodates the masses and alienates fringe voices. The enforcement tools use to mean unsophisticated mass deletion, but now there are systems of shadowban, limiting promotion of material etc, i.e. tons of steps to curtail "problematic" content before banhammer. The latter is rarely exercised in west, because other strategies seem to work well enough. This isn't to say masses won't get tired of TikTok eventually like every other media platform, but that it's content philosophy does make it stand out from western counterparts which might explain it's popularity. People are hooked TikTok because it doesn't feel like it's heading towards Eternal September, but maybe it's only a matter time.
This doesn't make any sense, I use tiktok and there's plenty of content I wouldn't expect china or america to endorse. There are lots of videos dedicated to communism, capitalism, uyghur muslims, BLM, etc. It's actually fairly open and this type of content gets noticeably boosted by the algorithm if you express interest in it, and gets a ton of likes too. There is also plenty of happy cat videos as well if that's your thing.
Also, ugly people get a lot of attention. I would expect china's social credit system to discredit those who are less attractive, but on tiktok you see less than conventionally attractive creators get a big following. They don't even need to be freak shows, it's just an app that's full of regular people openly talking about regular things. Very much the opposite of what I have heard about the way media works in china.
Allowable overton window differs between region to region - TikTok international is a business and will respond to local pressures, i.e. west shifted to laxer content restrictions due to MSM reporting of possible censorship last year. But behind the scenes the algorithm is biased towards mainstream content and limits dissemination of fringe / radical views, a must if you want to reach mass eyeballs in China. This is mostly in reference to actual ideology and not the dumb article about censoring ugly/poor, that's branding decision for advertisers. It follows same pattern on Chinese net, dissenting opinions are allowed to exist, either for limited time or exposed to limited eyes, unless gained too much traction in which case it will be removed, or endorsed for political purposes. Social credit has not been expanded to extent west think it does. Nor is Chinese internet as manicured west thinks. It's every bit as much of a shitshow as western internet except janitors come in to sweep up very frequently. If you experience it live, there's shit flinging all over the place. But TikTok itself very much feels like Douyin, lots of regular ppl doing regular things, very little drama or divisive topics because the janitors are proactively working in the background to shape platform sentiment versus west which is more reactive. I'm not saying it's analogous to Chinese net as a whole, but what is allowed to be mainstream and dictate the rhythms of society.
> Social credit has not been expanded to extent west think it does.
OT but this is the first time I see China's "social credit system" not being described as a myth on HN. People usually just repeat the myth pushed by mainstream media. Can you suggest something to read on this?
Otherwise the system is still very new and in progressive. If it's anything like BRI, it could be a massive uncoordinated internal shitshow of competing jurisdictions and incentives that doesn't pull together into anything cohesive for a long time.
TikTok has been publicly criticized for their censorship and filtering countless times, so I wouldn't doubt that they toned it down a bit in the non-Chinese versions while they're actively getting negative coverage.
1. the regulation and AI for Douyin and TikTok is completely separate and different. On TikTok I frequently see anti-China videos.
2. From my experience on Chinese social media, the debate on policies and voices on public grievances are common place. When there is a huge public blacklash for something the government is done, it might be filtered to tone down the "heat", but I believe that is to reduce the chance of the incident develop into uncontrolled populism and social unrest. For these incidents, the government usually acts really fast to address the incident. An investigation could be launched, and any government official found with wrongdoing is promptly sacked.
I find for public grievances, the government is already addressing many of them. For others, the government usually acknowledge it after sometime and add it to its working plan. For example, a lot of people were criticizing air quality in early 2010s. By 2013, government's added air quality to its working agenda and released a series of comprehensive plans to address air quality. For the past 8 years, the work on air quality has been consistent. And you can see how much air quality has improved in China. Same thing with poverty, education issues, left behind child, health care etc. So I believe the government does listen to the public, even though public backlash might be filtered at the moment.
A group of people demand change, but changes need time, government and society need time to adjust. The group that demand change could think that its their right to demand change and world should listen. They might use tactics such as massive protests to demand the world's attention. But mass protests in China massively dense cities could cause financial and live lost to others. At that point the group that demand change inadvertently infringing on others right to peace and good health. This is fear. The fear is not about criticisms for the government, but its about hot blooded public demands that grow into populism and hate. And populism creates irrationality in the society that doesn't help to address the issue and might cause more damages. Criticisms are to be addressed in the framework set out by the political system and in an environment that allows rational debate and negotiations.
Filtering on Chinese internet is about controlling populism, any kind of populism. In fact, articles that stoke mindless love for the ccp, personal admiration for xijingping, or hot blooded nationalism are also filtered. Also the platforms will try to remove fake news, spam accounts soliciting money, child pornography, and other illegal content. This stuff seems to be practiced in western internet.
I don't know this is the right way to do things though.
I've replied to other comments in the thread, but yes TikTok content varies between regions but the broad point is the algorithm will regress towards the wholesome instead of fragment towards radicalism over time. It doesn't not represent whole of Chinese internet, which your observations cover, but the model that survives censorship laws to reach wide spread popularity by focusing on wholesome content to preempt frequently arbitrary censorship whims. Petitioning and politics and dissent is widespread over Chinese internet, it's not as closed as most in the west believe, but they're happening on other platforms and serve as release valves for complaints and contradictions. Douyin / TikTok is where you go to avoid all that. So if you've been growing up on western internet, seeing Twitter / FB descent into insanity, TikTok is a welcome reprieve, with the caveat that said reprieve is by design and not novelty - it may very well fall out of favor with ban or time, but at it's heart, it's designed to stay wholesome which makes it an interesting alternative model in western market. .
You gotta give the masses a sense that the party is doing something for them, usuallly something unrelated to party affairs and politics, like civil criminal cases, that's when the censorship turn "lenient", and these specific cases that got public attention usually get to be solves quickly. But you never see sensitive matters being allowed to even exist, and any account who dares to challenge this boundary is quickly terminated..
That's the magic of censorship, to make the masses feel good, coz ignarance is bliss, the news are harmonious and bad apples are handled by the dear gov.
What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place. Of course, politics and toxicity exist all over Chinese internet as well, they just get filtered / harmonized over time or never reach many eyes in the first place. It maybe a bad unitary model for governing cyberspace policy for an entire country, but it's has merits when applied to certain audiences / networks and the west should learn from it even if TikTok gets banned.