When he tried to enter certain phrases in his bio, some of them—“Black lives matter,” “supporting black people,” “supporting black voices,” and “supporting Black success”—were flagged as inappropriate content. But white versions of the same phrases were acceptable.
“If I go into the Creator Marketplace and put ‘supporting white supremacy’ and hit accept, it’s OK,” he said in a TikTok video, standing in front of what he said was a video capture of him doing just that on his own phone. To get listed on the marketplace, he had to delete what he’d written.
In a follow up video, Tyler showed the phrases “I am a neo nazi” and “I am an anti semetic” getting accepted, while “I am a black man” was flagged. The story blew up, driven in part by an audience that was already frustrated by the way in which Black creators are treated on TikTok. In a comment to Insider, a company spokesperson apologized for the “significant” error and said that what Tyler was seeing was a result of an automatic filter set to block words associated with hate speech. The system, it said, was “erroneously set to flag phrases without respect to word order.” The company told recode that this particular error came from the inclusion of the words “Black” and “audience,” because its hate speech detection picked up on the “die” in “audience” and flagged the pairing as inappropriate.
