Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images
- Insider spoke to several TikTok creators who felt the app has "censored" Black creators.
- TikTok said the company "recognize[s] and value[s] the impact" of Black creators.
- Professor Rob Reich said tension between social media and civic discussions put apps in the middle.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
23-year-old Ziggi Tyler has over 422k followers on TikTok. But Tyler, who is Black, says the app is anti-black and doesn't value Black creators.
TikTok's quick rise in popularity since its inception in 2016 has introduced an entirely new realm of influencers culture, but not without controversy. Like Tyler, many other Black TikTok creators have shared grievances about the platform and alleged that its white stars have co-opted and profited from their content.
This tension was on display when Addison Rae, who has 82.5 million followers on TikTok, appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" to perform dances choreographed by Black TikTok creators without giving them proper attribution, reigniting the conversation over cultural appropriation on the app.
Black creators showed their frustration with the #BlackTikTok Strike, wherein Black creators elected not to create choreography for Megan thee Stallion's "Thot S—" to prevent non-Black creators from profiting off their work.
There have also been several allegations that TikTok's algorithm is racist, with creators alleging that their content is valued less than their white peers.
Read More: 'They take our dances.' Black users demand TikTok combat cultural appropriation
"There's always this consistent undertone of anti-Blackness on the app," Tyler told Insider. "Why isn't TikTok listening to us?"
A TikTok spokesperson told Insider that they "recognize and value the impact that Black creators continue to have on our platform, across culture and entertainment," adding the company is "committed to investing in resources and building technology that address" the concerns of Black users.
A timeline compiled by Insider demonstrates how the app has been marked by this history of allegations by Black creators.
Some creators allege TikTok puts Black creators at a disadvantage
Insider spoke with a scholar and Black influencers about the ethical responsibility of social media platforms like TikTok.
They argued the platform's For You Page algorithm, which shows users the content its artificial intelligence believes they want to see, puts Black creators at a disadvantage. Rob Reich, faculty director for the Center for Ethics in Society and the associate director at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, told Insider that "algorithmic models are themselves frequently riddled with bias."
"There's gotta be millions of pieces of content a day that are uploaded to the platform - if not, hundreds of millions," Reich, who co-authored "System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot" said. "There's just no conceivable world in which humans can review the content because there's just so much of it. So they have to rely on these machine learning tools," he continued.
-Wagatwe Wanjuki 🇰🇪 🇧🇸 (@wagatwe) August 1, 2021
Tyler began posting heavily on TikTok amid the unrest during the nationwide George Floyd and Breonna Taylor protests. He noticed that the more political posts - belonging to him and other Black content creators - weren't necessarily pushed out.
"You have an app that is entirely dependent on what Black people bring," he told Insider. "These big creators have careers because they take our dances and they make money.
So when you're not giving us those same opportunities of accessibility, we don't want to support you and we're going to leave," Tyler said.
Reich called that scenario "a great example of where we need a broader social movement towards algorithmic auditing in order to gain social trust and confidence in the decision-making of large companies."
"At the moment, social media companies get to do whatever they want with their algorithms and then just claim they're acting in our best interests, but they're not transparent about how the algorithms work and there's no independent audit about what its social effects are," Reich said.
Creators are alleging TikTok is 'shadowbanning' them
Jimi Satoki, known to the TikTok community as Trill Jimi, said his primary source of income is TikTok. The 18-year-old describes his content as "uplifting," and says he mostly posts about positivity, love, truth, and knowledge.
However, Satoki, a Black content creator, claims he has been banned from the app multiple times and alleged that many of his videos have been shadowbanned, meaning that the platform limited the number of views on a user's post, sometimes keeping it at zero views, without telling the user.
"I started getting censored, heavy. My videos would get taken down a lot - like multiple times a day. I would be blocked from posting temporarily for a week at a time, or a few days. My actual account got taken down four times," he said.
Satoki added "it's a problem that keeps happening over and over and over," forcing many creators to step away from TikTok [or] not be on it as much."
It's a concept many social media users are familiar with - including Tyra Blizzard who frequently uses her page to discuss issues that impact marginalized communities.
The TikTok creator called it "a systemic issue."
"When it comes to TikTok as a platform, we kind of have to think of it on a bigger scale and what the goals are," she told Insider. "They align exactly with the capitalist mindset: they're just trying to make money."
"My content won't be shown to people. It's especially evident in having 500,000 followers and getting barely 2,000 views on a video. It doesn't make sense," Blizzard added.
Her videos normally receive a larger number of views - ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands.
"Video views will vary from video to video, and the number of followers a person has or whether they have other high-performing videos does not affect how their video is suggested in For You feeds. This means that creators may see some of their videos receive more views than others," a TikTok spokesperson told Insider.
TikTok has said it's working to support Black creators and improve their algorithm
TikTok has made several efforts to support Black creators and improve the platform's algorithm.
On June 1, 2020, TikTok released a statement addressed to the Black community in response to protests over anti-Black censorship allegations on TikTok. Later that month, TikTok released a progress report detailing their changes to support Black creators.
As detailed in their progress report, this includes a new Creator Diversity Collective, highlighting Black voices and Black history, and donating money to causes that support Black people and creators.
A viral post by Ziggi Tyler wherein he exposes a flaw in the TikTok Creator Marketplace algorithm that prevented him from typing the word "Black." It did, however, allow him to type in phrases such as "pro white," "neo Nazi," and "anti-semite."
On July 8, a couple of days after the video was posted, TikTok issued a public apology for the "significant error" that made users question the TikTok Creator Marketplace algorithm. "The word "die" (from within the word "audience") paired with "Black" and "people" in the same paragraph were erroneously flagged as a phrase, and blocked as a safeguard against hate speech and threats. Our team has modified the safeguards to fix this overcorrection going forward," TikTok told NBC News.
However, some don't find these efforts to be substantial.
"Let's stop celebrating creator funds, incremental creator features, and shallow rhetoric about creator empowerment. All of these will fail to solve creators' economic precarity, so long as we fail to fix the fundamental issue, which is OWNERSHIP," said Li Jin, founder of Atelier Ventures, in a string of tweets to her 77,000 followers. Jin did not respond to a request for comment.
-Li Jin (@ljin18) June 24, 2021
TikTok has denied allegations of racism, censorship, and shadowbanning, and claims to be working towards solving the issues at hand.
"We wholeheartedly want to be part of the solution and will continue to share updates as we make progress toward these goals," the spokesperson said.
Read more about the financial implications of white creators co-opting Black creators' content here.