TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

Certain people can try to turn this into a controversy in our modern hypersensitive hysteria, but this is perfectly sensible and reasonable behavior.

Users want to see attractive, popular, charismatic, entertaining people. They want to be like them. They want to see more of them. TikTok isn't interested in turning off its userbase, no matter how much your sociopolitical agenda might prefer that.

Geez, I thought this might be an overblown piece about algorithms unwittingly optimizing for the wrong things, but the headline is pretty accurate. Discussing how moderators choose content to recommend to people in the “For You” section (not a user — I assume this is something highlighted to users):

> Under this policy, TikTok moderators were explicitly told to suppress uploads from users with flaws both congenital and inevitable. “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” traits are all enough to keep uploads out of the algorithmic fire hose.

A TikTok spokesperson seems to confirm they are real guidelines, but won’t confirm how they were used.

> TikTok spokesperson Josh Gartner told The Intercept that “most of” the livestream guidelines reviewed by The Intercept “are either no longer in use, or in some cases appear to never have been in place,” but would not provide specifics.

The Russians call this "face control"; the practice of maintaining a club full of only good looking people by the bouncers.

It's unpleasant, but a handy reminder that TikTok and other social networks don't work for you, but make you into a product.

This is not about low quality content getting automatically filtered out by an algorithm because people don't like it. This is about TikTok using human moderators to prevent users from ever seeing content made by people they don't like.

This is what happens when you mix utilitarian morality with a desire to stop online bullying. You just stop letting the most likely targets of bullying be seen. This is much cheaper and easier than trying to get rid of everyone who has ever been mean online, because that's everyone.