@Xeniax Original source (August 8, 2025).

tl;dr: likely pre-emptive censorship; be careful not to speculate

in comments, tumblr user afriendofblahaj links this YT video by Etymology Nerd, who says there is actually little evidence TikTok is censoring or silencing content about anti-ICE protests, but that the "festival" tag is an interesting example of people both pre-emptively self-censoring and finding like-minded people using euphemistic code words.

he's quoted similarly in this Axios post about Washington, DC "music festivals", which notes that TikTok does not formally prohibit protest content. (Here's another article with some comments & statements from TikTok users.)

TikTok recently announced they're revamping their Community Guidelines. Mashable's breakdown notes:

The section on Misinformation, nestled in Integrity and Authenticity, is mostly the same but with some language edits. For example, the previous guidelines state that unverified information about emergencies is ineligible for the For You Feed; the new ones say the same about "crises and major civic events."

People are speculating this may be a response to content about current protests, but I doubt TikTok will say anything explicitly.

What I would want to know before boosting this: is there actual evidence certain tags or content are being de-prioritized or silenced, or are people just anticipating it? E. g. can you still find useful information about protests on relevant tags/are people's posts about protests not showing up for followers?

Note: this particular screenshot was posted by "The Shitposting Robot" on Facebook (August 13, 2025). This is a page that uses Facebook's paid subscription option to make money off of screenshotting other people's posts, watermarking them, and posting them without credit, links, dates, or other context. You can decide for yourself whether this is a trustworthy source of information.

Postscript on research methods:

I found the original source by Googling (with udm=14) "thewitchoftheweed"+"la music festival", although searching for the first sentence in quotes also brings up many reblogs (which all have links to the original, because of how Tumblr reblogging works).

I found the articles by Googling "TikTok festival censorship", clicking the News tab, and using the "Tools" menu to sort by date instead of relevancy. (Query.)

I found the original Facebook post of the screenshot by Googling "the shitposting robot", finding the Facebook page, and going through their photos from Aug. 8 (the original post's publication date) onwards.

Interesting to look back at this five months later ... here's what's currently happening today in terms of decentralization the ATmosphere.

• @rudyfraser.com announced today that Blacksy feeds and moderation service are now powered by our own atproto relay -- and it's an independent implementation, not using Bluesky's reference code. It's really worth reading the thread, which has a great analogy for how a relay enables custom feeds.

• @edavis.dev has configured deer.social (a third-party app) to to point to a self-hosted bsky appview which reads from a self-hosted relay which subscribes to a self-hosted PDS which is where this -- as he says, "Bluesky independent from Bluesky".

• @bnewbold published A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month, updating his post from last summer. The network size has increased by close to an order of magnitude since his first post; the cost of a realy

• #FreeOurFeeds is donating a $50K to the AT Community Fund to support the #IndieSky working group. The notes from last week's Ahoy IndieSky Europe give a sense of the energy here -- and also link to a bunch of other projects that sure look decentralized to me and discusses the prospects of Eurosky.

Of course, like I said in the article,

""Decentralization" means different things to different people. As the links in the Appendix highlight, people who are focusing on the (very real) concentration of power in the ATmosphere today, or the potentially-centralizing architecture of AT, find it more useful to describe Bluesky as centralized."

And the power concentration -- or "operational centralization" as Bluesky folks were calling it at the ATmosphere Conference -- is still very real. Bluesky still runs almost all of the infrastructure for the ATmosphere, and it's by far the most popular app, and most other apps (as well as Bluesky) use the Bluesky AppView, Relay, and labeler.

Then again, that's clearly in the process of changing, and it'll be interesting to see how it looks six months or a year from now.

@laurenshof @fediversereport @cyrus @cwebber @rysiek @jonny @possibledog @oblomov @rwg @Kye

#bluesky #ATmosphere