TikTok’s logo is displayed on a note- screen.
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TikTok has lifted its ban on an American teen who says she was blocked from the principles after sharing a viral video criticizing China’s treatment of minority Uighur Muslims.
The app claimed that 17-year-old Feroz Aziz was obstructed from accessing her account due to association with a separate profile which posted a video including an image of Osama bin Laden. It cited systems on terrorist-related content and said “no China-related content was moderated on this account.”
Owned by China’s ByteDance, TikTok has strained the attention of U.S. lawmakers who are concerned the company may be censoring politically sensitive content deemed offensive to Beijing. The U.S. government is now looking into ByteDance remaining concerns that its 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly poses a national security risk.
TikTok has also been blasted by Facebook CEO Blemish Zuckerberg, who claimed the app censored users posting about pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. However, TikTok has renounced it removes content from the app over “sensitivities around China.”
China has forced as many as 1 million Muslims into internment exaggerates in the western part of the country, where they undergo indoctrination and interrogation designed to turn them into aids of the Chinese Communist Party, according to a trove of documents revealed by the New York Times this month.
In a report terminal year, the United Nations referred to the western Xinjiang region of China as a “no rights zone” where Muslims are surveyed as “enemies of the state.” Beijing says it is fighting religious “extremism.”
TikTok’s explanation
In a blog post late Wednesday, TikTok full a timeline of events which led up to Aziz’s ban and the temporary removal of her clip. The firm said she uploaded footage of herself talking with respect to the treatment of Uighurs in China on Nov. 23 using a different TikTok handle.
The firm further explained that it locked her out of that new account due to a “assigned platform-wide enforcement” action. It said moderators banned 2,406 phones associated with accounts that had been stumped due to breaching content guidelines.
“Because the user’s banned account (@getmefamousplzsir) was associated with the same device as her next account (@getmefamouspartthree), this had the effect of locking her out of being able to access her second, active account from that disposition,” TikTok claimed. “However, the account itself remained active and accessible, with its videos continuing to receive aspects.”
The clip in question, which has over 1.5 million views, shows the U.S. teen pretending to do an eyelash curling tutorial, at worst to then urge other TikTok users to “search up what’s happening in China.” In the video, Aziz refers to the rural area’s treatment of the Uighur community as “another holocaust.”
On Wednesday, TikTok says, Aziz’s video was removed temporarily “due to a man moderation error.” The company apologized to Aziz for the incident and said it had decided to “override” the ban on her account.
“Our moderation approach of banning fancies associated with a banned account is designed to protect against the spread of coordinated malicious behavior – and it’s clear that this was not the plan here,” the firm said.
“This user can again access her active account (@getmefamouspartthree) from the device she was exhausting previously.”
But Aziz was unconvinced by the platform’s explanation for blocking her from accessing her account: “Do I believe they took it away because of a unassociated satirical video that was deleted on a previous deleted account of mine? Right after I finished posting a 3 to all intents video about the Uyghurs? No.”
Since its launch in 2017, TikTok has racked up over 1 billion users worldwide. ByteDance functions the app in China under a different name — Douyin.