CHENNAI: Our time will come. When it comes, we will kill you,’’ says TikTok user @SREENU to Dalits in a 15-second clip on the controversial app. In his public profile, he claims to represent Vanniyars, a Most Backward Class (MBC) community.
He shares videos attacking Dalits to his 10,800 followers with hashtags such as #pmkfam (PMK family referring to the political party that has a strong Vanniyar base), #Vanniyars and #Kshatriya.
Videos with these hashtags had garnered over 1 million views just on the day Express checked the site.
TikTok first became popular as Musical.ly. The app was used for entertainment and music. However, the way in which it is being used has changed after it was purchased by the China-based ‘Bytedance’. Bytedance renamed the app to TikTok to compete with a bigger American market.
TikTok remains a showcase of creativity and humour but there is also a dark side to it. The first calls for its bans from politicians — including PMK chief Ramadoss — were on the grounds that it promoted ‘obscene’ material and endangered children and women.
The app was even briefly banned earlier this year. However, there is a less-acknowledged problem lurking on TikTok: open casteism and bigotry.
While all social media companies have been slow to respond to abuse and hate speech, TikTok seems to be a new frontier of the ‘Wild West’.
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Take @SREENU, for instance. Each of his videos is supported by others, ostensibly of his community, backing his slurs and abuse in the comment section.
Express looked at profiles across the app and found that there were scores of users spreading inflammatory propaganda on the basis on caste-based discrimination. Some of this content was several months old but had not been removed by Tik Tok.
It is not just the members of one community sharing such content. The #Dalit had nine million views while #Nadar had 9.9 million views. Similarly, videos with #Gounder too have gone viral.
However, there was a difference in the content shared by those of the oppressed community and those of caste Hindu communities.
In one video, a person with the username kishore014377 attacks Dalits claiming they had spoken against late PMK leader Kaduvetti Guru.
He goes on to say, ‘‘Do you think we will let you marry upper-caste women? We will pierce you with a sword.’’ He further refers to Dalits in derogatory terms.
On the other hand, profiles with #Dalit hashtags had milder responses to these abuses from other communities.
Emmanvijay 4, a user claiming to be Dalit, simply says, ‘‘Say no to caste discrimination’’.
While these videos are viewed by lakhs of people, it is not known how often threats of violence online turn into physical acts of violence offline.
However, experts say that the app lacks proper security mechanisms and content filtering, which poses a risk.
According to Vijayakumar Kumarappan, a Chennai-based cybersecurity expert, the app has 500 million users across the globe with over a fifth of them — 119 million — in India.
Only a platform for hate
While TikTok does seem to pose a risk by nudging users to make their content publicly accessibly and by failing to remove hateful content in a timely manner, many pointed out that the problem was to do with deeply-held casteist views finding a platform that could amplify them.
“People are going after the bee rather than going after the beehive. TikTok is merely a platform and the issue is much deeper,” said a private employee, who writes on caste in India and wanted to remain anonymous.
Writer and filmmaker Rajesh Rajamani agreed. Rajamani said that while TikTok had indeed made it easy for people to spew hatred against other castes, the public nature of the Tiktok videos only made it easier for stakeholders in society to intervene and address the problem.
“In a caste society, caste supremacist tendencies and hated are perpetuated not only in TikTok videos but in families, educational institutions, workplaces and pretty much every other public or private space.
We are shocked at caste-hatred spewing TikTok videos because of their crude and unabashed nature. But when it happens in refined and sophisticated ways, we refuse to intervene,” he said, pointing to a recent Twitter discussion on how a Chennai group of schools was perpetuating Brahminical supremacist thought among its students in the guise of Hindu culture.
“Soon, students from similar schools in Chennai shared identical experiences and stories. However, none of the media houses picked up the issue to investigate further. Since most of these schools belong to very closed Brahmin-Savarna networks, it is easy to curate public opinion. Similarly, family Whatsapp groups continue to be the most effective breeding ground for all casteist and patriarchal beliefs. In comparison to the influence of families and schools, Tiktok is probably a small fry,” he said.
‘Safety our priority’
In response to the queries posed by Express, a representative from TikTok said, “At TikTok, safety of all our users is a key priority. We are committed towards maintaining a safe and positive in-app environment for our users to showcase their creativity and talent along with abiding by and complying with local laws. TikTok strictly does not endorse or promote content that is in violation of its comprehensive Community Guidelines.”
“TikTok has put in place protective measures by combining content moderation technology with a robust human moderation team that filters content on a real-time basis."
"The moderation team in India covers most major Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu and others. As part of commitment towards providing a positive in-app environment for its users in India, (from July 2018 to April 2019), we have removed over six million videos that have violated our Community Guidelines,” the representative added.
(Inputs from Nirupama Viswanathan)