While social media has provided a lot of benefits to people’s lives, it has also given some truly unsavory characters a platform that they would not have otherwise been able to take advantage of. A good example of this can be seen on TikTok which ended up becoming a bit of a haven for various people that wanted to spew racist rhetoric and created content that propagated more of the same.
TikTok pledged to make it so that hate speech and other related forms of content would not be given the same kind of platform that they have had previously, but with all of that having been said and now out of the way it is important to note that things are not really going all that successfully on that particular front. A study by Institute for Strategic Dialogue looked at over a thousand TikTok videos, and the researchers noted that a third of them contained content that promoted white supremacy or some other kind of racist and hate filled ideology that the world would most definitely be better off without.
The content of these videos is quite concerning. They often promote conspiracy theories that promote the idea that white people are somehow being rendered extinct by the high birth rates of other races, a racist idea if there ever was one. Plenty of these videos also try to make it seem like the white race is somehow superior to other races, and critics are arguing that it is TikTok’s rather lax policies regarding censorship that leads to videos like this not just being made but becoming downright popular on the platform as well.
While it is not fair to say that a majority of the content on TikTok is racist or spews hateful rhetoric, suffice it to say that a significant portion does and this is quite dangerous for a lot of different reasons. For one thing, if the problem exists and is not dealt with as quickly as possible, this would probably result in it becoming a great deal worse before it gets better.
TikTok has a lot of problems that it is slowly starting to solve, and a lot of these might just be attributed to the incredible growth rate that the platform saw which is resulted in things getting out of hand, but with some concentrated effort the platform can definitely end up making things a lot better.
Read next: TikTok is testing another new update by exceeding its video limit up to 5 minutes (and even longer) in the coming weeks
TikTok pledged to make it so that hate speech and other related forms of content would not be given the same kind of platform that they have had previously, but with all of that having been said and now out of the way it is important to note that things are not really going all that successfully on that particular front. A study by Institute for Strategic Dialogue looked at over a thousand TikTok videos, and the researchers noted that a third of them contained content that promoted white supremacy or some other kind of racist and hate filled ideology that the world would most definitely be better off without.
The content of these videos is quite concerning. They often promote conspiracy theories that promote the idea that white people are somehow being rendered extinct by the high birth rates of other races, a racist idea if there ever was one. Plenty of these videos also try to make it seem like the white race is somehow superior to other races, and critics are arguing that it is TikTok’s rather lax policies regarding censorship that leads to videos like this not just being made but becoming downright popular on the platform as well.
While it is not fair to say that a majority of the content on TikTok is racist or spews hateful rhetoric, suffice it to say that a significant portion does and this is quite dangerous for a lot of different reasons. For one thing, if the problem exists and is not dealt with as quickly as possible, this would probably result in it becoming a great deal worse before it gets better.
TikTok has a lot of problems that it is slowly starting to solve, and a lot of these might just be attributed to the incredible growth rate that the platform saw which is resulted in things getting out of hand, but with some concentrated effort the platform can definitely end up making things a lot better.
Read next: TikTok is testing another new update by exceeding its video limit up to 5 minutes (and even longer) in the coming weeks
