Alyssa Mullins 0:00
Hi everyone, I’m Alyssa.
Preston Snyder 0:02
I’m Preston!
Alyssa Mullins 0:02
And welcome to your weekly social!
So today, we’re gonna talk about Tik Tok.
Preston Snyder 0:11
We’re gonna talk about Tik Tok?
Alyssa Mullins 0:12
We’re gonna talk about Tik Tok.
Preston Snyder 0:13
What about Tik Tok?
Alyssa Mullins 0:14
Tik Tok is shadow banning people.
Preston Snyder 0:15
What is shadow banning?
Alyssa Mullins 0:16
Shadow banning is hiding a user’s account and whatever they post or do from other followers, in a kind of like a sneaky way so that they don’t fully notice it until their viewers and everything kind of drops.
Preston Snyder 0:29
They don’t know about it.
Alyssa Mullins 0:30
They don’t know about it.
Preston Snyder 0:31
Why are they shadow banning people?
Alyssa Mullins 0:33
They’re shadow banning people just because community guidelines that are being broken, I guess? But also not being broken at the same time? It’s very vague; Tik Tok is being real vague about it.
Preston Snyder 0:45
Well, what’s it about?
Alyssa Mullins 0:46
Basically, what Tik Tok is doing is, any user that mentioned anything about like cryptocurrency, whether it’s trying to educate or maybe trying to get a person to buy into something, Tik Tok is just saying, “Nope, this violates our community guidelines. And sorry, we’re gonna block your video and you might be banned from the platform for 24 hours, two days, maybe a week, maybe more, or you might lose your account altogether because of the content that you’re posting.”
So odds are, this comes in light of a lot of controversy surrounding cryptocurrency as a whole. There have been exchanges that have gone through regulatory issues. There’s a bill that went through the House and Senate within the infrastructure bill that got a lot of notable attention. And then there’s been a trend on social media of influencers carrying out what is called a “Pump and Dump,” or a “Rug Pull,” which is when a high end influencer says, “What up my 1000’s of followers, you should invest in this very highly speculative meme coin!” So followers following the influencer, go ahead and throw some money there. The price valuates. And then when it gets to a certain point, where it’s like, “Wow, this has made incredible gains!” maybe starts to plateau a little bit. Everybody who is in on the front floor, everyone who got in first sells. They walk away with a bunch of money; the object coin in question immediately goes down to pitiful amounts of money. Everyone who invested that didn’t know about the con now has a useless asset, and the other people walked away scot free with a bunch of money. Our best guess from this is that Tik Tok’s trying to crack down on scams and other things from influencers on a wide influencer heavy platform like their own to try and prevent this. However, the way they’re carrying out is dubious at best.
Yeah. And it’s interesting because you have, like I mentioned earlier, you have influencers that are just trying to educate people on what cryptocurrency is. They’re not trying to sell you on anything, not really trying to do anything besides tell you what it is and what it means because it’s new, it’s a little different. People don’t always fully understand what it is, and so that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re following the rules, but then because it’s mentioned, Tik Tok says no, and removes their video and then no one can see it. If they keep doing that, and the more content that they post, they’re noticing that their viewer counts are dropping. Even their followers are noticing that overall, they’re like not popping up on the “For You” page that’s meant for you. And if you’re following them, it’ll usually pop up, and so even their followers are noticing that they’re not catching all the videos that are being posted. As you keep going into it, it is on cryptocurrency and that’s been a bigger one that people are mentioning, but it’s also happening on a lot of other influencers videos as well. When their video gets blocked or shadow banned, these influencers will try to get in contact with Tik Tok and say, “Hey, what happened? What What did I do wrong?” And they either don’t hear back at all, and their videos don’t even come back. Or for some influencers, they have gotten some of their stuff back. The more common thing is that they don’t know what they’re doing wrong.
Our article of choice, where we referenced a CNBC article that detailed can 11 people who’ve gone through this; a few people are now on the edge of getting permanently banned. And they still don’t know why. Which is also kind of dangerous for Tik Tok, because if they’re not telling them specifically why, does this up open them up to trouble for partiality and discrimination?
And with that dip, there are a lot of influencers that are saying, “Okay, we’ll pack up and go!” and go to any other platform. Instagram, Twitter even, there’s still Snapchat.
Even YouTube, which has its shorts feature which is basically just Tik Tok.
Yeah. And Instagram has reels. Hopefully Tik Tok has clear guidelines and will maybe eventually start telling these influencers, just what they’re doing, and clear up some of that confusion there? But we’ll just have to wait and see.
Overall, we hope that Tik Tok’s able to sort this out. Again, we hope that these influencers are able to not be monetarily punished with their livelihoods for a seemingly random and unspecified guideline. But regardless, based on our topic of today’s conversation, you’re probably not gonna see this one on Tik Tok.
Yep. But that’s all we have for today. So thank you guys so much for watching, and we’ll see you next week!
