[ad_1]
Addressing the criticism, TikTok said there has been “misinformation and mischaracterisation” about how the platform operates, adding that hashtags are added by content creators and not the social media platform.
“Millions of people in regions such as the Middle East and South East Asia account for a significant proportion of views on hashtags. Therefore, there’s more content with #freepalestine and #standwithpalestine and more overall views,” TikTok said in its blog post.
“It is easy to cherry-pick hashtags to support a false narrative about the platform.”
According to TikTok, while #standwithisrael may be associated with fewer videos than #freepalestine, it has 68 per cent more views per video in the US, which means more people are seeing the content.
Both TikTok and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, ban content promoting Hamas.
TikTok said that between Oct 7 and 31, it removed more than 925,000 videos in the conflict region for violating its policies around violence, hate speech, misinformation and terrorism, including content promoting Hamas.
It also noted that the difference in volume between content related to Palestine and those related to Israel is similar across platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
On Facebook, 11 million posts have been tagged with the #freepalestine hashtag, which is 39 times more than those with #standwithisrael. The pro-Palestinian hashtag is also found on 6 million posts on Instagram – many times more than the pro-Israel hashtag, according to its data.
TikTok also said there has been an upward trend of Palestinian support among Americans born after 1980, citing Pew Research surveys.
“The data shows that this support is not new and was rising before TikTok was created, so it would be unrealistic to ascribe such broad sentiments to a single communications channel such as TikTok,” said the platform.
[ad_2]
Source link