TikTok exposes its double standard on genocide
January 28, 2022
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, TikTok announced that it would launch a plan to fight Holocaust denial by combating misinformation on the platform.
Elizabeth Kanter, TikTok’s director of government relations, said that “Hateful behavior is incompatible with TikTok’s inclusive environment, and we’ll continue to put our full strength behind keeping our platform a place that is free of hate, while harnessing the power of TikTok to educate our community.”
It’s commendable for companies to put resources into remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust, but this is quite a hypocritical move coming from Chinese-owned TikTok while there’s currently an ongoing genocide against Uyghur muslims happening in China.
If TikTok is so concerned about educating its community on genocide and promoting an “inclusive environment”, they should address the human rights abuses being committed right now in their home country of China. Instead, TikTok goes to great lengths to remove content that raises awareness about the Uyghur genocide.
TikTok has been accused in the past of censoring users who speak out about the Uyghur genocide and even suspending their accounts. A former employee of ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, claimed that the company “tried to build an algorithm for censoring Uyghur-language livestreams.”
TikTok is not the only major corporation that has a China problem. AIM has previously reported on the considerable amount of Chinese disinformation that’s spread every day on Twitter. Disney has also bowed to China on multiple occasions, including censoring an episode of the Simpsons in Hong Kong and changing the endings of popular movies in order to appease the CCP’s sensitivities. The NBA regularly censors criticisms of the Chinese government at its games and among its players and coaches, preferring to instead to stay silent about the Uygher genocide while they rake in piles of Chinese cash.
With the Beijing Winter Olympics right around the corner, the media’s hypocrisy when it comes to China has been on full display, proving many major corporations are willing to ignore human rights abuses to make money. That’s why TikTok’s efforts to fight Holocaust misinformation on its platform fall flat. Perhaps TikTok should be more concerned with raising awareness about the humanitarian crimes being committed right now against an entire population of people in its home country.