Tik Tok censors videos that displease the Chinese government

Popular Chinese-owned social network TikTok censors videos that address topics at odds with the Chinese politburo's public views, it emerged on Wednesday, such as Tibetan independence or religious group Falun Gong.

Leaked documents seen by The Guardian detailed the site’s moderation guidelines, and laid out how ByteDance, the Beijing-headquartered technology company that owns TikTok, was advancing Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app.

TikTok allows users to upload and share short videos in a portrait format, and is popular with young users in English-speaking markets, as well as its native China.

Controversial content would be seen as a violation, the leak suggested, and would result in it being taken down, while videos marked "visible to self" would be viewable by the user who posted them, but invisible to all other users on the app.

There were different banning groups across the platform as well, with a ban on criticism of China’s socialist system falling under a general ban of “criticism [or] attack towards policies, social rules of any country, such as constitutional monarchy, monarchy, parliamentary system, separation of powers, socialism system, etc”.

Another ban covered “demonisation or distortion of local or other countries’ history such as May 1998 riots of Indonesia, Cambodian genocide, Tiananmen Square incidents”.

A more general purpose rule banned “highly controversial topics, such as separatism, religion sects conflicts, conflicts between ethnic groups, for instance exaggerating the Islamic sects conflicts, inciting the independence of Northern Ireland, Republic of Chechnya, Tibet and Taiwan and exaggerating the ethnic conflict between black and white”.

The guidelines also forbade specific mention of a list of 20 current and former world leaders, including Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung, Mahatma Gandhi, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Kim Jong-un, Shinzo Abe, Park Geun-Hee, Joko Widodo and Narendra Modi.

The revelations came amid rising suspicion that discussion of the Hong Kong protests on TikTok was being censored for political reasons.