ByteDance’s keyword blacklist revealed – Forbes

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, runs a tool to track the use of “sensitive words” on its products, according to Forbes. The tool tracks every single use of the terms, logging the identity of the user and their location. William Evanina, the former US head of counterintelligence, suggested the Chinese government was tracking American TikTokers who might say something critical of Beijing. Forbes posted several eyebrow-raising wordlists supposedly drawn from internal documents, including lists of “negative core words of the party, government” and “Falun Gong” terms for tracking, plus a “must-kill word list” concerning “June 4,” the date of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. TikTok has admitted to collecting data on the “hit rate” of sensitive words, but insists this function merely helps the company understand app performance.

TikTok has been accused of using political lists to monitor the use of vocabulary surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza denied any of the political lists had ever been used on the platform, though she acknowledged the company enforced an oddly-specific disinformation policy concerning Uyghur camps through keywords. Most of the list titles had “translation errors” and were not relevant to TikTok, while others were just wordlists used to protect the community from hate speech, misinformation, and other harmful content. The US federal government and more than half of its states have banned TikTok on official devices, citing the threat of spying by Beijing.