Reacting to a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the social video-sharing platform TikTok admitted that it restricted LGBTQ-related hashtags in certain countries.
The report found that TikTok restricted the word “gay” in Russian and Arabic, “I am a lesbian” and “I am gay” in Russian, and “transgender” in Arabic.
The BBC reports: “TikTok said that while some terms were restricted to comply with local laws, others were limited because they were primarily used to discover pornographic content. It added that some English phrases and some compound phrases in Arabic had been moderated by mistake, and that it had fixed the issue. And it said some of the hashtags reported by the ASPI did not reveal any content because they had never been used by a video-maker on TikTok.”
