When TikTok Bans the Trans Flag Emoji, the Platform Becomes the Message
To the corporations, we are nothing but data points and income streams that can be exchanged as part of a deal. To many of the trans users who rely on these platforms for their only understanding community, losing access to said platforms means losing access to their whole social world.
The internet will only be a place of free mass communication if the means of communicating aren’t co-opted by fascism.
Yesterday, TikTok users reported that they were no longer able to use the trans flag emoji when writing on TikTok. In its place, users were only able to post the white flag and a trans symbol, which far fewer people recognize.
Sympathetic interpretations have said that this could be an error where the trans flag emoji, which is made by combining the white flag and the trans symbol, is unable to be merged together. However, that would not explain why this error has not appeared with other emojis.
Given that the American version of TikTok is set to be owned and controlled by a coalition of Trump-aligned oligarchs, the inability of users to post the trans flag, the primary marker of a people who the trump administration views as one of its primary enemies, is almost certainly a deliberate choice. If it was an accident, it probably would have been fixed by now.
Many other websites have made a habit of censoring trans content and users or coming down harder on trans users than they would on cis people for similar infractions. This is most well known with Twitter, but has also been a feature of websites like Tumblr and Bluesky, where moderators have arbitrarily banned trans accounts over personal grievances.
TikTok is no stranger to censorship. Many of the new phrases popular among its users were created and popularized to speak about serious issues without having their videos hidden by the algorithm, such as ‘unalive’ to refer to death, ‘corn’ as a euphemism for porn, etc.
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