For those of you who spend your lives cranking out TikTok content, I have negative news: You’ll no longer be able to wax unimpededly political. The next time you toss your hips to a quarter-minute of hip hop, you’ll need to watch your mouths.

If you’re unfamiliar with the uber-popular app, witness its video gold:

Federal agents investigating a series of armed robberies across Metro Detroit have arrested a popular TikTok personality after he was spotted dancing in what investigators described as his stick-up shoes https://t.co/nvdgWuCKa0 pic.twitter.com/0coFoJY76w

— Robert Snell (@robertsnellnews) February 25, 2022

Since clips can last up to three minutes, it’s an excellent arena for expressing ideas:

Interesting look into how subtly asking to choose pronouns is designed to confuse people. And it works. pic.twitter.com/RvBgF1P1Pd

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) March 1, 2022

However, the site’s amended its Community Guidelines, and a muzzling is among us.

TikTok is owned by China-based tech company ByteDance. As you might’ve heard, the People’s Republic isn’t known for its adoration of insolence toward authority.

Apropos of such an absence of amore, the platform’s new prohibitions strive to stamp out “Harmful Misinformation.”

“Misinformation is defined as content that is inaccurate or false,” the update explains. “We will remove misinformation that causes significant harm to individuals, our community, or the larger public regardless of intent.”

What constitutes “significant harm”?

Examples are thus:

• Illness
• Large-scale property damage
• Serious physical injury
• Death

Additionally: “Severe psychological trauma.”

On top of all that annihilation, there’s one more way you can no longer destroy the world. Users aren’t anymore allowed to engage in the following:

• The undermining of public trust in civic institutions and processes such as governments, elections, and scientific bodies

So if you don’t trust the government, you’d best not admit it. Such an act could wreak “harm.”

An example of violation, called out by unlikely TikTok twerker Mike Pence:

As for “scientific bodies,” such would presumably include one Anthony Fauci, as he’s declared himself The Science.

In order to get it right, you’ll need to sort out an array of assertions:

Other offenses TikTok won’t tolerate:

• Misinformation that incites hate or prejudice
• Misinformation related to emergencies that induce panic
• Medical misinformation that can cause harm to an individual’s physical health
• Content that misleads community members about elections or other civic processes
• Conspiratorial content including content that attacks a specific person or a protected group, includes a violent call to action, or denies a violent or tragic event occurred
• Digital Forgeries (Synthetic Media or Manipulated Media) that mislead users by distorting the truth of events and cause significant harm to the subject of the video, other persons, or society

Social media is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

In March of 2020, Twitter outlawed making fun of someone’s age.

At the time, it posed a plethora of questions:

How do we protect conversations people have within marginalized groups, including those using reclaimed terminology? …

How can — or should — we factor in considerations as to whether a given protected group has been historically marginalized and/or is currently being targeted into our evaluation of severity of harm?

How do we account for “power dynamics that can come into play across different groups?

How indeed.

Also from the Bluebird’s do’s and don’ts:

We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.

At one point in America, free expression was considered a value. But that was back when words couldn’t break your bones.

Now enlightenment is our X-ray, and wokeness our radiologist.

Diagnosis: We’ve all been shattered.

But more brittle than us, evidently, is the government. Uncle Sam is a sensitive megalomaniac, so don’t dare indicate mistrust.

At least, keep your cynicism far from TikTok.

The five-year-old company — with over one billion account holders, most of them young — is working on a more unified America.

And if you think that makes its users sheep, they’re probably absolutely fine with it:

Sheep has entered the Tiktok ages and now there's a dancing sheep on tiktok could it get anymore crazier than this! pic.twitter.com/oKUDTYrHl7

— AtT | LittleWelshSheep☕ (@LittleWlshSheep) December 24, 2021

-ALEX

See more content from me:

CBS Ukraine Coverage Hammers Home America’s Withering Grasp of the High Stakes

Christian Speaker Gets Canceled by Christian College for Teaching Christian Students Christian Ideas

Devil’s Advocate: Indiana Elementary School Teacher Owned a Satanic Temple

Find all my RedState work here.

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