Yesterday, I posted a video on TikTok reporting on how the Biden administration is planning to bar parents who oppose gender ideology from the foster care system. Within less than an hour of posting the video, TikTok removed it for “Hate Speech and Hateful Behaviors” and “Nudity and Body Exposure,” ironically “misgendering” (as the left calls it) a trans-identifying individual in the process. You can watch my “hateful” video below:
In my TikTok, I detail how the Biden administration plans to label foster parents who reject the transing of children as child abusers. The proposed rule states that “to be considered a safe and appropriate placement, a provider is expected to utilize the child’s identified pronouns, chosen name, and allow the child to dress in an age-appropriate manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified gender identity and expression.”
The immediate victims of the proposal are foster children because the regulation will dramatically limit the already small pool of available foster parents. Moreover, if passed, the proposal threatens all parents and children. As Federalist Senior Contributor Nathanael Blake explains, “Given the government control of the foster care system, this is a convenient place for the left to establish the precedent that rejecting gender ideology and the rest of the LGBT movement’s dogmas is abusive and harmful to children and that those who do so are unfit parents. Once they have set this point, they’ll expand it to everyone else — after all, if it’s abuse for foster parents, it’s abuse for biological parents as well.”
TikTok’s Censorship Is Hateful
In its explanation for removing my video, TikTok stated it does “not allow any hateful behavior, hate speech, or promotion of hateful ideologies. This includes content that attacks a person or group because of protected attributes.”
Apparently, according to TikTok, if you oppose chemically castrating and sexually mutilating children, you subscribe to a “hateful ideology.” Of course, the real hateful and damaging ideology is the one that supports creating identity crises in children and irrevocably damaging minors’ bodies before they can legally buy a scratch-off ticket.
TikTok also accused me of posting “nudity and body exposure” because I included a photo of a transgender-identifying girl’s chest post-mastectomy. “We do not allow nudity, including uncovered genitals and buttocks, as well as nipples and areolas of women and girls,” TikTok wrote.
According to radical leftists, who believe the lie that women can be men and men can be women, the trans-identifying girl in my video is a male. By censoring the girl’s chest post-mastectomy because TikTok doesn’t allow the display of “women and girls” nipples, TikTok effectively “misgendered” the trans person in my video. TikTok’s own censorship guidelines state that misgendering is not allowed on the platform, so TikTok’s censorship of my video is actually “hateful behavior” that violates their own standards.
TikTok Running Cover For Biden
TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, and there are serious concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s influence over both it and the minds of its 150 million American users. What’s less discussed, however, is the U.S. federal government’s influence on TikTok and, therefore, millions of Americans.
ByteDance has faced serious threats from both the Trump and Biden administrations to either sell TikTok to an American company or face banishment from the United States. At the same time, TikTok is employing an unsettling number of former U.S. intelligence officials in censorship positions, such as content moderation and trust and safety. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that TikTok is employing these former intelligence officials, who will censor speech disfavorable to the Democratic Party, in order to curry favor with our leftist executive branch and avoid expulsion from the country.
It is unlikely, however, that calls to ban TikTok, at least from Democrats and their allies in the intelligence apparatus, stem from concerns for national security or privacy because the feds and their Democrat cheerleaders routinely treat the American people like national security threats and have no regard for citizens’ privacy.
Indeed, Missouri v. Biden and the Twitter Files revealed that multiple federal agencies and the Biden White House bullied tech platforms into controlling and even banning topics and specific people in the digital public square. What the feds care about isn’t privacy and security; it’s social and political control.
Anecdotally, many conservative users, including myself, have experienced far more punitive and frequent censorship on TikTok compared to its competitor, Instagram (although censorship on Instagram remains abundant). In the last three months alone, I’ve been censored three times for reporting on news unflattering to leftists, and the videos weren’t allowed to stay with “false” or “harmful” labels, as they often are on Instagram. Instead, they were completely removed.
The message of my latest video was less about the trans debate and more about the Biden administration’s insidious plan to remove foster children from the homes of conservative Americans. As I said in the video, the only people who benefit from the proposal are leftists, who want to win “the political long game by annihilating conservative American families.” Exposing the Biden administration’s plan as a clear move to indoctrinate children and discriminate against conservative families is not helpful to Biden and his already precarious reelection effort, which is likely why it was censored.
Indeed, it appears Chinese-owned TikTok is learning the ropes of the U.S. Censorship Industrial Complex. Tech platforms, Chinese or American-owned, can forge lucrative alliances with the U.S. federal government so long as they are willing to help Democrats censor their political opponents and get around the First Amendment. This is the greatest, most immediate threat to American national security.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
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