If you work in the world of social media or simply upload content to TikTok, we have bad news. The short video social network has removed the function of searching for specific hashtags within its Creative Center tools, as reported by The New York Times. For professionals and creators, this will limit the ability to obtain information about the traction of certain tags.
Thanks to the tools of TikTok’s Creative Center, content creators can delve into various usage trends, something of great value for social media campaign planning. However, TikTok has removed the hashtag search feature due to suspicions that the data was being used to criticize the possible censorship of the platform.
“Critics of the company had taken advantage of the tool to argue that TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, does not adequately moderate the app’s content and that Beijing influences the posts that appear on it,” The New York Times reports in its article.
Before this update, at the top right of the TikTok Creative Center, you could find a search option with a magnifying glass icon, as seen in the previous image. Without this feature, the tool now focuses specifically on sharing data about the top 100 hashtags used in different sectors.
The change was expected. And it is that TikTok has been asserting for a long time that the platform is not a place for political discussions, as it works to distance itself from polarizing debates, as well as from new analysis of its links with the Chinese Government.
For a few years now, various articles have pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party may have a special interest in TikTok, especially in Douyin, the Chinese local version of the app. But TikTok itself, which is still facing a possible ban in the United States due to geopolitical tensions, has logically tried to downplay and avoid any such association as much as possible.
