TikTok's Tools for Suppression — The Online Creators' Association

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.