RoastieBeef
Mythic
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- Nov 3, 2018
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Vice news is trying to censor incel knowledge and pills from appearing on social media. How dare the youth learn the truth
“This woman needs a beating,” says the TikTok comment that Rue Partida reported for breaking community guidelines. Less than 30 minutes later, she received a notification—according to TikTok, the comment didn’t violate any rules at all.
“What the fuck is wrong with TikTok for not taking this comment down, but everyone else gets banned left and right for nothing?” tweeted Partida, a 21-year-old in LA. “
In the past six months, more and more TikTok users have been sharing their experiences of encountering misogynistic content on the app, to the extent that one user, Benito Thompson @_mindofmusic, has become known for singing the word “misogyny” to a violin and piano musical accompaniment in response to a number of videos on the app. “Users definitely tag me in misogynistic content all the time now,” he told VICE World News in an email.
Using the stitch feature, in which someone can include a clip of another TikTok user’s video in their own TikTok, women have been calling out behavior or jokes they consider to be demeaning.
While Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have been taking very public criticism for their failure to protect users from hate speech, TikTok has somehow slid conspicuously under the radar. But there’s concern the platform isn’t doing enough to counter misogynistic comments and hate speech, some of which is associated with groups with a history of real-world violence against women, such as incels.
Back in August, the Institute of Strategic Dialogue released a report by analyst Ciarán O’Connor looking into hate speech on TikTok, which found numerous examples of misogyny. Accounts promoting Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), a social movement that is part of the wider manosphere marked by overt misogyny, were discovered alongside videos that combined misogyny with other forms of hate, such as white supremacy.
O’Connor also found videos recorded by Elliot Rodger that had been uploaded by a variety of users. Rodger killed seven people in 2014 in a shooting, stabbing, and vehicle attack in California, including one in which he laid out his plans to murder people, specifically women, prior to carrying out his attack. The 22-year-old self-described incel killed himself following the attack.
Several months later, VICE World News has been able to find historic video clips of Rodger speaking disparagingly about women, simply by searching his name, including one where he says “you girls have starved me of sex, and enjoyment, and pleasure for my entire youth.” It’s been seen over 123,000 times.
While searching for “Elliot Rodger” brings up the app’s banner telling the user “this phrase may be associated with hateful behavior,” we were able to find videos using associated terms, including: “elliot rodge”, “elliot rodgers footage” and “elliot rodgers edit.” Users are also able to use the hashtags #elliot and #rodgers next to each other.
Similarly, VICE World News was able to find that while #MGTOW was a banned hashtag, users were allowed to have MGTOW in their usernames, such as @mgtowistheway and @mgtowmemes, which has published videos like “3 worst type of cockblockers,” a video in which a 3D character tries to insert a stick into a woman’s mouth while laughing, and a video in which a man jokes that he is surprising his “favorite person” and enters her home before revealing that she doesn’t know he exists.
A TikTok spokesperson said: "Hate has no place on TikTok, and we do not tolerate any content or accounts that attack, incite violence against or otherwise dehumanise people on the basis of their gender. We work aggressively to combat hateful behavior by proactively removing accounts and content that violate our policies and redirecting searches for hateful ideologies to our Community Guidelines.”
Going by its banned hashtags, TikTok seems to be aware of a possible incel problem, although they have never mentioned it publicly; #incel is banned, as are #femoid, a derogatory term for women, and #blackpill, a belief in which looks are genetically determined, that women choose partners purely based on such looks, and that there is no point in trying to alter this.
But the bans have been uneven. #redpill, in which adherents believe this can be changed by picking up dating tips or changing how they look, is flourishing at 942.9 million views. Much of the content might not be outright hate speech, but among the most-viewed videos under this hashtag are TikToks titled “Do you think make-up is a form of lying in a relationship?”, “If you are interested in a girl but she says: ‘Let’s just be friends’, tell her “NO!”’, and “Women be like: I deserve a $9,000 ring, $50,000 wedding...and all she has to offer is pre-owned pu**y.”
#Hypergamy, where plenty of women post as well as men, has over 100 million views. It’s a word used in the incel community to describe their belief that women will always go for men they see as superior in looks and status.
“Regarding why some incel-adjacent lexicon is allowed, and why others aren't, it would be encouraging if TikTok were to share publicly, or in a limited capacity with researchers/media to help us understand, what definitions it uses for terms that have a clear link to hateful ideologies,” said O’Connor. “Essentially—greater transparency.”
While O’Connor is unsure why #redpill would be permitted while #blackpill is not, he says it highlights “how TikTok’s efforts to limit the use of offensive phrases or terms linked to extremist activity or communities are quite narrow.”
He added that TikTok routinely fails to address alternative spellings of banned hashtags, allowing users to easily evade them.
“I think something that online companies need to see is that, while incels and the Blackpill are an extreme form of misogyny, the same ideologies and the same attitudes towards gender roles are still present across multiple Red Pill communities, and even in some communities which would not necessarily identify as being ‘red-pilled,’” said Frazer Heritage, who specializes in gender and sexuality at the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University.
“This woman needs a beating,” says the TikTok comment that Rue Partida reported for breaking community guidelines. Less than 30 minutes later, she received a notification—according to TikTok, the comment didn’t violate any rules at all.
“What the fuck is wrong with TikTok for not taking this comment down, but everyone else gets banned left and right for nothing?” tweeted Partida, a 21-year-old in LA. “
In the past six months, more and more TikTok users have been sharing their experiences of encountering misogynistic content on the app, to the extent that one user, Benito Thompson @_mindofmusic, has become known for singing the word “misogyny” to a violin and piano musical accompaniment in response to a number of videos on the app. “Users definitely tag me in misogynistic content all the time now,” he told VICE World News in an email.
Using the stitch feature, in which someone can include a clip of another TikTok user’s video in their own TikTok, women have been calling out behavior or jokes they consider to be demeaning.
While Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have been taking very public criticism for their failure to protect users from hate speech, TikTok has somehow slid conspicuously under the radar. But there’s concern the platform isn’t doing enough to counter misogynistic comments and hate speech, some of which is associated with groups with a history of real-world violence against women, such as incels.
Back in August, the Institute of Strategic Dialogue released a report by analyst Ciarán O’Connor looking into hate speech on TikTok, which found numerous examples of misogyny. Accounts promoting Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), a social movement that is part of the wider manosphere marked by overt misogyny, were discovered alongside videos that combined misogyny with other forms of hate, such as white supremacy.
O’Connor also found videos recorded by Elliot Rodger that had been uploaded by a variety of users. Rodger killed seven people in 2014 in a shooting, stabbing, and vehicle attack in California, including one in which he laid out his plans to murder people, specifically women, prior to carrying out his attack. The 22-year-old self-described incel killed himself following the attack.
Several months later, VICE World News has been able to find historic video clips of Rodger speaking disparagingly about women, simply by searching his name, including one where he says “you girls have starved me of sex, and enjoyment, and pleasure for my entire youth.” It’s been seen over 123,000 times.
While searching for “Elliot Rodger” brings up the app’s banner telling the user “this phrase may be associated with hateful behavior,” we were able to find videos using associated terms, including: “elliot rodge”, “elliot rodgers footage” and “elliot rodgers edit.” Users are also able to use the hashtags #elliot and #rodgers next to each other.
Similarly, VICE World News was able to find that while #MGTOW was a banned hashtag, users were allowed to have MGTOW in their usernames, such as @mgtowistheway and @mgtowmemes, which has published videos like “3 worst type of cockblockers,” a video in which a 3D character tries to insert a stick into a woman’s mouth while laughing, and a video in which a man jokes that he is surprising his “favorite person” and enters her home before revealing that she doesn’t know he exists.
A TikTok spokesperson said: "Hate has no place on TikTok, and we do not tolerate any content or accounts that attack, incite violence against or otherwise dehumanise people on the basis of their gender. We work aggressively to combat hateful behavior by proactively removing accounts and content that violate our policies and redirecting searches for hateful ideologies to our Community Guidelines.”
Going by its banned hashtags, TikTok seems to be aware of a possible incel problem, although they have never mentioned it publicly; #incel is banned, as are #femoid, a derogatory term for women, and #blackpill, a belief in which looks are genetically determined, that women choose partners purely based on such looks, and that there is no point in trying to alter this.
But the bans have been uneven. #redpill, in which adherents believe this can be changed by picking up dating tips or changing how they look, is flourishing at 942.9 million views. Much of the content might not be outright hate speech, but among the most-viewed videos under this hashtag are TikToks titled “Do you think make-up is a form of lying in a relationship?”, “If you are interested in a girl but she says: ‘Let’s just be friends’, tell her “NO!”’, and “Women be like: I deserve a $9,000 ring, $50,000 wedding...and all she has to offer is pre-owned pu**y.”
#Hypergamy, where plenty of women post as well as men, has over 100 million views. It’s a word used in the incel community to describe their belief that women will always go for men they see as superior in looks and status.
“Regarding why some incel-adjacent lexicon is allowed, and why others aren't, it would be encouraging if TikTok were to share publicly, or in a limited capacity with researchers/media to help us understand, what definitions it uses for terms that have a clear link to hateful ideologies,” said O’Connor. “Essentially—greater transparency.”
While O’Connor is unsure why #redpill would be permitted while #blackpill is not, he says it highlights “how TikTok’s efforts to limit the use of offensive phrases or terms linked to extremist activity or communities are quite narrow.”
He added that TikTok routinely fails to address alternative spellings of banned hashtags, allowing users to easily evade them.
“I think something that online companies need to see is that, while incels and the Blackpill are an extreme form of misogyny, the same ideologies and the same attitudes towards gender roles are still present across multiple Red Pill communities, and even in some communities which would not necessarily identify as being ‘red-pilled,’” said Frazer Heritage, who specializes in gender and sexuality at the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University.