In social networks, users are not the same. According to an investigation by ‘Forbes’, TikTok, a digital monster that, based on videos and viralization, has exceeded one billion users, is more permissive with the content shared by the most popular Internet users that with which the majority goes up. In other words, if you make a ‘post’ that, for whatever reason, is at the limit of what is permissible in the application based on its internal policies, you are more likely to be removed than an account with five millions of followers.
Precisely when a user has that number of people attentive to each video he publishes -a figure that is easier to obtain in the Chinese ‘app’ than in competing tools, such as Instagram- it becomes cataloged within the TikTok with a ‘creator tag’, which differentiates it from other Internet users in terms of moderation.
“We don’t want to treat these users like any other account. There should be a little more leniency, I would say,” a social network worker said during a meeting dated last September 2021.
Another assistant mentioned by ‘Forbes’, in this case as a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton, acknowledged to said medium that he had already heard similar words from another TikTok worker in the past: “He was quite direct in saying that a famous person could publish content and I could post content, and if both were inappropriate, the famous person could stay awake.”
It should be remembered that, as is the case with Facebook, Instagram or any digital tool dedicated to communication, TikTok has mandatory rules of use regarding content considered harmful: from incitement to violence to suicidal behavior, going through so many other categories. In case a user breaks the rules, according to the position of the application, he can be punished with temporary or permanent suspension of the account.
ABC has contacted the social network to see if, indeed, it moderates the content that is published within it based on the number of followers that the user on duty has. It states that at TikTok the rules “apply equally to all content and accounts, and we are committed to applying them in a fair, consistent and equitable manner. More followers does not mean more permissive moderation.”
However, the applications did not respond to ‘Forbes’ question on whether accounts with many followers have been privileged at some point in the past.
TikTok is not the only one
This is not the first social network that transcends that could be rewarding its most popular creators. A year ago, thanks to the leak of thousands of internal Facebook documents, it emerged that the crown jewel of the Zuckerberg empire had been doing exactly the same thing.
Specifically, ‘Wall Street Journal’ shared that Facebook had a system called XCheck that allowed high-profile users of the social network to bypass some of its internal rules. According to this medium, thanks to this system, in 2019, the Brazilian soccer star Neymar was able to show photos of a naked woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his followers before Facebook removed the content.
In conversation with ABC, Ferran Lalueza, professor of Communication at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and an expert in social networks, is not surprised by the possibility that TikTok, like Facebook before it, may be having a softer hand with the accounts that have more followers. He although he remarks that, obviously, it is not the most desirable.
«The rules are to be followed, and most of them in social networks, in addition, are very reasonable. Theirs is that they be applied equally to all, “says the teacher.
Lalueza points out, in turn, that, in the event that social networks were to be more lax with the infractions committed by some accounts, this should not happen, specifically, with those that have more followers: «The applications should put the focus in the most popular creators, since the impact of the posts shared by these is much greater than in the case of anonymous users