Tiktok is now very popular among the Z-generation around the world. This is an app created by the Chinese company ByteDance. In China, the Chinese version of Tiktok called Douyin is not the only popular app created by ByteDance, there are a few other apps created by ByteDance are also popular such as Jinri Toutiao, a news app famous for its recommendation algorithm similar to Tiktok, also Huoshan Video, another video app similar to YouTube.
This Toutiao app encourages general people to create content like posts, tweets etc. However recently some experience we had with it makes us think whether the platform is treating the general content creators seriously.
Recently we were trying to publish an original post created based on some experience we had to solve a browser issue, and we were thinking that the post should be approved soon as it was purely tech related and didn't promote anything. However, it got rejected by its reviewing system after a few minutes. The reason given was we were not allowed to publish public social affair or public breaking news related content since we were not qualified media.
That's fine as we thought that the automatic reviewing system might find that some keywords might be public social affair related and the system is not smart enough to differentiate them yet(not content aware). Hence we went to appeal for a manual review, unfortunately we were told that the appeal was rejected again without any further reason given in one hour.
We were confused and sought to contact their support directly through official channel and they did get someone to answer our doubts. The disappointment came with the conversation with the support which led us to think whether Toutiao is treating general content creators seriously.
Below is the screenshot we had while trying to communicate with their support.
The summary is they keep saying we should refer to the content guideline which has more than 50 bullet points covering different areas. And even with our review we are not sure which rule we are violating specifically(definitely it is not the one provided earlier by their review system). Our expectation is that the support should at least tell us which exact problem it has or s/he should go and review it again if can or at least they could try to understand our problem first instead of just providing official response/trained response. Otherwise how is this different from asking a smart chatbot? We also understand there would be many such queries everyday given it's such a big platform, however, the platform is supported by hundreds of millions of general people like us and we all expect some kind of serious treatment when it is needed.
In the end, we gave up the post and instead posted it on another platform which didn't post same concerns. To see the content which got rejected and approved in another platform, you can read it here. The English version is here.
