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TikTok continues to fail to remove sexist content

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In late May, electronics giant LG Poland came under fire for posting a sexist and offensive promotional video on its TikTok page. The video, which reached as many as 20 million views before LG Poland removed it, shows an elderly man sneakily snapping upskirt pictures of a young woman as she walks up the stairs. When the woman confronts the man, she grabs his phone to only find selfies, and apologizes. As she walks away, the old man swipes to reveal several photos of her skirt and proceeds to fist pump in celebration.

While LG Poland has since issued an official statement apologizing for the incident to PhoneArena and on its TikTok account @lgpoland, this is just one of many instances in which TikTok has failed to remove sexist content that has directly violated community guidelines from its platform.

According to TikTok’s community guidelines, posts that violate the platform’s rules about sexual exploitation, and are subject to removal, include content “that depicts, commits, or incites non-consensual sexual acts” and content “that commits, promotes, or glorifies sexual solicitation or sexual objectification.” Surely, LG’s video violated these standards, yet TikTok itself did nothing about the video. Only about a week before LG Poland’s stunt, the National Commission for Women (NCW) wrote a letter to the grievance officer of TikTok India, Anuj Bhatia, asking TikTok to remove videos of a man committing violence against women and promoting revenge acid attacks. The NCW also asked that the man depicted committing these acts, Faizal Siddiqui, face immediate action from the Maharashtra’s director general of police.

The video, which went viral on Twitter, was taken down and TikTok suspended Siddiqui’s account a day later. But they undeniably only did so because the NCW pushed them to. Siddiqui’s acid attack video is not an isolated one; it is merely one of many videos on TikTok glorifying harassment, abuse, and violence committed against women in India. News 18 describes the sexist content as an “existing trend” of videos that “remain unnoticed under the clutter.” In fact, in 2019 the Madras High Court placed a ban on TikTok in India after finding TikTok responsible for spreading “sexually abusive content.” The ban, however, was lifted within two weeks after TikTok lost $500,000 each day it was banned in India.

It’s no surprise that TikTok has let this content slip through the cracks of their community guidelines. Instead of removing objectifying and sexist content, documents released by The Intercept show that TikTok moderators have been told to suppress users with “abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” or in “dilapidated housing,” as well as users endangering “national honor and interests.” More recently, TikTok has been accused of suppressing #blacklivesmatter and #GeorgeFloyd hashtags amid global protests surrounding the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who was killed by the police.

With 800 million active users worldwide, it’s perhaps unrealistic to expect that TikTok will single-handedly remove all sexist content posted to the platform. The responsibility also lies on the users, who should call out misogyny on the app and report any content that potentially breaches community guidelines. But TikTok has repeatedly, purposefully censored content it deems unattractive, while allowing highly publicized sexist, violent, and hateful content to remain. Until the platform implements stricter community guidelines and moderates sexist content, TikTok will continue to be complicit in sexist behavior it consistently allows and neglects.



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Isabella Ramirez
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