To avoid criticism? TikTok has disabled an important feature for platform researchers

January 11, 00:35 Share:

TikTok has limited the work of the Creative Center (Photo: DADO RUVIC \ Reuters)

TikTok has closed access to monitoring the popularity of hashtags. The tool was one of the few publicly available methods for tracking activity on the platform.

A tool called Creative Center, created in 2020, was available to everyone and could provide numbers on the number of videos tied to a specific hashtag and information about the audience that watched those videos. This allowed advertisers to track popular hashtags on the site and researchers to analyze how TikTok moderates content on the platform.. However, Creative Center has recently become unavailable.

The change was first noticed by the Network Contagion Research Institute, which tracks disinformation and extremism on the Internet.. Researchers used the tool to create a report presented last month. It said that TikTok was significantly less likely than other social networks to present topics that may be sensitive to the Chinese authorities (genocide of the Uyghur population, protests in Hong Kong, etc.). d.). Researchers noticed the absence of a tool while analyzing videos about the United States. Hashtags they studied (#BLM, #Trump2024, #Biden, etc.). d.) were no longer available, and the “Search” button disappeared. There were no announcements about this from TikTok.

“Everything that is politically sensitive or could be politically sensitive or explosive is gone, and everything that is pop culture is no problem. It's really strange to me that they haven't announced it or said anything about it,” said institute founder Joel Finkelstein in a commentary