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Lizzo has called out the Chinese conglomerate ByteDance-owned popular social media app TikTok for shadow-banning her content on the platform. She called the company out after noticing a difference in the viewership between her Instagram and TikTok pages. In a TikTok video that is no longer available, the singer said that she was "officially shadow-banned." She noted that the video she had posted on Instagram already had 135 thousand views in less than 30 minutes.
She added:
"In less than 30 minutes? Deleting this but this app getting wack."
Lizzo has more followers on TikTok but her recent videos have been more popular on Instagram. This episode of shadow-banning is the latest in the long history of censorship by the platform.
Lizzo to stop posting footage on TikTok
As one of the larger creators on the platform, Lizzo has more than 26.9 million followers. Compared to that, Lizzo has only 13 million followers on Instagram. However, her videos on TikTok had 100,000 views, compared to her usual view count of anywhere between 500,000 and several million on Instagram. This only seemed to lend credence to her claim of shadow banning.
Lizzo, who is currently on her North American tour, has stated that she will no longer post her concert footage on TikTok. This may lead to her fans switching to a different platform
The Tik Tok debacle is the second hurdle that Lizzo has faced so far on her tour. The first one was her having to cancel the Montreal concert of the tour due to a sudden onset of fever. The singer also canceled the Hartford concert, which was supposed to take place after two days after the Montreal concert.
No statement has been made on the matter by the social media platform so far, consistent with its previous episodes of shadow banning. The app previously banned LGBTQIA+ content in an effort to provide "local moderation guidelines," according to an exclusive exposé by The Guardian on September 26, 2019.
The moderation guidelines also ban local humanitarian news such as protests. The guidelines have also been found to be discriminatory regarding religious beliefs, disability, poverty, and fatphobia. All of this was exposed in an exclusive report by The Intercept that was published on March 15, 2020.
The report stated that in "non-diversified" content, where the person in the video is the focus if their appearance or shooting environment isn't "good," the video will be "much less attractive." According to the report, their research showed such a video wouldn't be worthy of being recommended to the users of the platform.
The "not good" appearance examples according to the report include:
"Abnormal body shape, chubby, have obvious beer belly, obese, or too thin (not limited to: dwarf, acromegaly)."
The platform has also been noted for the promotion of xenophobia and far-right-wing extremism, as well as a rise in sympathetic diseases such as eye tics from Tourette Syndrome.
