Infographic: How To Support TikTok Creators

We made a new infographic on the TOCA stream tonight! Kind of our first infographic, actually. It’s a list of ways that fans can support TikTok creators, ascending in importance.

The infographic is titled "How To Support TikTok Creators," with The Online Creators' Association's logo. The graphic has five sections, each with an emoji, a title, and text.

Thumbs up: Engagement! Follow, watch videos, like, and comment. And...

Smiling face: Sharing Content! Share videos on other platforms and encourage friends and/or family to watch. And...

Blushing smiling face: Tipping! Tip them through money transfer tools like TikTok tips, cash.app, venmo, or PayPal. And...

Heart eyes face: Stable Income! Make a committed regular donation on sites like Patreon. And...

Champagne bottle popping: Support for Labor Rights! Push TikTok to share a percentage of ad revenue with creators.

2022, The Online Creators' Association. officialtoca.com

TikTok Safe Screen Area Test Results & free templates

The TikTok UI displays very differently across different devices, and creators often receive comments politely informing us that we’ve put something where users can’t see it, even when we put in extra effort to avoid covering up important details in frame. Unfortunately, TikTok provides few tools to aid users in avoiding these issues, and those tools don’t work particularly well.

In order to help mitigate this problem, TOCA administrator T.X. Watson surveyed their audience for data. They posted two videos to their TikTok account of a registration grid—one with captions positioned above the video description and one with captions positioned at the top of the screen—and set up a submission form where users could share screenshots of those grids, as displayed on TikTok.

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In the following 12 hours the form received over 400 screenshots, and Watson enlisted aid from Mike Power, @mathgic77 on TikTok, who used Python to align the images. Watson then stacked and blended those screenshots to produce a map showing where content on TikTok is most likely to be occluded.

From those images Watson created a set of templates for use in editing software outside of TikTok. Unfortunately to our knowledge there’s no way to use these templates within TikTok’s video recording environment without making them a part of the final video, but we hope they serve as a useful reference for as many users as possible.

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TOCA Admins interviewed by the Washington Post TikTok

Last month several members of the TOCA administrative team spoke with Chris Vasquez of the Washington Post about TikTok’s moderation and accessibility practices. Over the past few days, the @washingtonpost TikTok account published three videos about the content of that interview, featuring clips of several administrators.

We’d like to thank Chris, as well as Dave Jorgenson and the Washington Post for bringing attention to these issues.

TikTok Discussion at Arizona State University

Note: This post is about an event that took place before this site was built, and is back-dated to the date of the event. It was written on 2021-10-08.

TOCA administrator T.X. Watson gave a talk at Arizona State University at the end of March 2021 on the shortcomings of TikTok’s moderating systems. The event was hosted by ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research, through their research cluster on Race, Queerness, and Tiktok.

TikTok's Tools for Suppression

note: this post was written on TOCA’s previous website and was back-dated to correspond to its original publication date.

The Online Creator’s Association initially came together to help creators large and small navigate our shared experiences with TikTok, provide moral support, and eventually communicate the negative issues we found directly to TikTok.

After a week of general talking among creators what our first goal should be became very clear. Since approximately May of 2020 creators have all been experiencing similar negative phenomena that we did not realize was system wide while we were still operating individually. We needed to pool our resources and begin looking at when these negative phenomena occurred. The latest spike in unusual activity occurred in the wake of the news regarding a TikTok ban on August 1, 2020.

Please find a transcript of our latest video below as well as a gallery of analytics from a range of creators from July 31st 11 PM EST to August 2nd 11 PM EST of 2020 where we documented a distinct drop in FYP views from 10-20 creators ranging from 1k followers to 200k followers with a calculated reach of approximately 2 million viewers, in a variety of tags and communities.

Any changes to this post will document any new or amended data we find around the video suppression that was documented on August 1st.

Transcript from TikTok:

We here at The Online Creators Association have been gathering information on TikTok's For You Page experience. It's a part of our ongoing efforts to help support and organize small creators on the platform. Since the Blackout protest in May, many creators have found that their reach to their viewers is unpredictable and unreliable. With our combined resources we've been able to collect anecdotes that seem to point to TikTok's ability to artificially promote videos to the For You Page and to suppress videos it does not want to reach the For You Page. With the recent announcement surrounding a TikTok ban we believe any creators that have been deemed by TikTok to create content that does not portray them in a favorable light have had their views cut by at least half or have had their videos blocked from the For You Page altogether. If you’d like to review our sources, please review our blog which is linked in our linktree up above. Thank you.

Further reading:

"Auto r" evidence by benthamite tiktok.com/J6UcEuj/

theguardian.com: Revealed how TikTok censors videos that do not please Beijing

tubefilter.com: TikTok Moderators Were Told To Suppress Videos Made By Marginalized Users Because They Might Be Bullied

Netzpolitik.org: TikTok curbed reach for people with disabilities