Study details how people use hashtags, video effects, and music on TikTok to promote hate against Asians, women, Muslims, Jews, and Black and LGBTQ people
Despite pledges to crack down on hatred, TikTok is still trafficking in short-form videos that promote white supremacy and anti-Black racism … Source: ISD .
Context & Ripple Effects
This study extends a paper trail going back years: in 2018 TikTok was already struggling to remove blatant white supremacy and Nazism despite its young user base, and after reports of viral antisemitic videos the company pledged in late 2020 to do more against coded language and symbols. The throughline is that each crackdown targets one vector while the next report finds another.
First-order effects
- TikTok's moderation team must now adjudicate hate embedded in creative features rather than text alone, and per the relationships it has already ruled that at least 14 of the accounts ISD flagged do not violate its rules — putting its policy definitions directly at odds with the researchers' findings.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and civil-society monitors lose a key transparency tool as scrutiny tightens: TikTok had already restricted Creative Center, built to help advertisers track hashtags, after critics used it to probe content beyond this study's scope (reported by the New York Times) — meaning the hashtag vectors named here are harder for outsiders to audit going forward.
Third-order effects
- If feature-level evasion keeps outpacing policy updates, platform moderation shifts from content takedowns toward structural levers — recommendation tuning and researcher access — where TikTok's record is mixed: its algorithm was found promoting anti-LGBTQ videos including calls for violence (per Media Matters), and ISD later documented hundreds of openly extremist accounts sharing Hitler-related propaganda (in 2024).
The trend: Hate-speech enforcement on short-video platforms is becoming an arms race between evasive use of native creative features and moderation policies written for explicit content, with researcher access to platform data emerging as the contested ground.