How do people use self-censorship to avoid having their content suppressed on sites like TikTok?

University of Illinois anthropology professor Kendra Calhoun studies the creative language people use on social media platforms to fool algorithms that may incorrectly categorize content as “inappropriate” or “offensive.” Calhoun calls this phenomenon “linguistic self-censorship.”

In a recent report, you and your coauthor, Alexia Fawcett of the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote that TikTok’s content-moderation practices sometimes delete or suppress posts that reference contentious subject matter such as suicide, race, gender, and sex or sexuality. Does this have a disproportionate effect on some users’ speech?

Yes. These practices disproportionately affect TikTok users who are already structurally marginalized in society based on their identities and backgrounds. In our research we found that users from all types of backgrounds engage in linguistic self-censorship, but those who expressed the most fear of having their content suppressed were primarily people from marginalized groups.

What communities are most likely to have their posts removed or suppressed?

There isn’t publicly available statistical data on TikTok’s moderation practices, but TikTok content creators who are from communities marginalized based on race, gender, and/or sexuality have been some of the most vocal about their content being suppressed or removed. A large portion of the examples in our study came from creators who are Black, transgender, and/or queer. People with social and political beliefs that go against the beliefs of people in power is another group whose content may be at risk of suppression. We’ve seen this recently with pro-Palestinian content in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s retaliatory war.

Are social media companies doing anything to better protect the free speech of marginalized groups or others while also protecting users from harmful content that violates platform policies?

Social media platforms all have public-facing community guidelines that are supposed to govern their content-moderation practices, but these guidelines still have to be interpreted by moderators so there’s always room for unequal application. Years of research on content moderation and censorship on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and now TikTok shows that the suppression of marginalized people’s language is an ongoing problem. But content-moderation decisions are company-internal decisions, so social media users don’t know if or how these companies are attempting to resolve this conflict.

How are users adjusting their own speech to avoid being censored on TikTok? 

The main goal of linguistic self-censorship online is to avoid writing or saying specific words or phrases that could be recognized by an algorithmic filter. Users do this in a lot of creative ways by manipulating spelling, sound, and meaning, as well as using digital linguistic resources like emojis and speech-to-text technology. Someone might avoid writing the word “gay” by spelling it “ghey,” or replace the word “porn” with the emoji for the rhyming word “corn,” as in “