TikTok Cracks Down on Crypto Related Creators

Cryptocurrency creators who claim they are trying to educate consumers say their content is getting censored and taken down for violating community guidelines on TikTok.

While ByteDance is partnering with blockchain services, crypto influencers themselves may no longer have a great place to voice their opinions on TikTok. TikTok recently rolled out a system that automatically removes content that violates community guidelines.

Audius, a decentralized music streaming service, announced a major partnership with video-sharing app TikTok that allows its artists to upload their music to TikTok to be used in videos. ByteDance is quite interested in the music streaming space, and could even have a good path to becoming a player in the future of DeFi, depending on China's regulatory environment.

ByteDance is essentially a GenZ company and TikTok is one of its best platforms. Audius was not the obvious choice for partnering with the short video giant. A digital music streaming startup founded in 2018, it isn’t one of the major streaming services such as Apple Music or Spotify.

As for the loud crypto influencers who claim to be educating the consumer, they are crying foul. Many creators are now considering a shift to Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Discord if TikTok continues to remove crypto-related posts. Crypto influencers have often faced bans on YouTube, Medium or other platforms and even with Bitcoin's 2nd coming, it's not clear where they will go.

In the last month, at least 10 of his videos have been taken down for promoting illegal activities and regulated goods. It appears TikTok automated AI content moderation might spot crypto influencers and their weird keywords easier.

TikTok is not supposed to be censored by Beijing, but for many topics it clearly is. Now in August, 2021 crypto content is getting flagged or taken down permanently with little explanation from TikTok. Free speech is not always a thing when the app is from China, even in an American market. The pandemic has not generally been good for online censorship as even major American platforms now censor a ton of topics, as social media is no longer the friendly town square it once was.

The problem with a lot of automated content moderation is the lack of communication and clarity for creators. When videos are pulled from TikTok, the creators say they get a notification that they violated community guidelines. Sometimes it notes that they posted content related to ‘illegal activities and regulated goods.’ The guidelines haven’t been updated since December, though TikTok rolled out its new detection feature a little over a month ago, when creators say the takedowns ramped up.

If TikTok is for the GenZ community, bans on crypto creators seems a bit strange since young people generally are quite pro-crypto. In a future of AI moderating content, crypto might just be a bad word.

Social media firms have not done a great job moderating their platforms with constantly changing rules and a lack of staff to deal with violations of guidelines in an acceptable manner. Those pesky crypto creators have just been shut out on the biggest consumer app platform in the world.

In a world of constantly changing guidelines on platforms, who can keep up? Nobody reads those changes to terms of service update notices.

As of this summer of 2021, in July, TikTok implemented a system that can automatically block videos violating its policies, and the company recently updated its branded content policy, barring the promotion of financial services including cryptocurrencies, unless users?disclose it through a branded content option in the app . Indie crypto creators might be at odds with TikTok's push into social commerce and more legit influencer marketing.

So much for free speech on today's platforms.

What do you think of crypto influencers and creators getting banned on social media?