That's an extremely naive way of looking at it, and maybe perhaps the ideal way for Americans look at it, but it's actually beautiful.
- TikTok's power has never been about explicit statements, their power come from suggesting the right videos at the right time from authentic people, people who the viewer partly identifiy with, not preached to, and doing so graduallly a bit at a time, not all at once. Complying with a few keyword blocks doesn't change that, especially since by the time a keyword need to be blocked it's already widely known.
- The act of explicitly censoring popular keywords actually achieve the opposite effect than make people think less, another video that support Luigui is just another video, but a statement that says "the oligarcy does not want you to think about Luigi" hits much different. What you''d do if you actually want to supress something is soft-ban, i.e. supress those videos in the algorithm, and TikTok could have easily done that.
- Last but not least, XHS is widly known now, so is Douyin, the alternative to TikTok has already been established, and it's very much in China's interest to reshape American TikTok in such a way as to push users to fully Chinese platforms, after all why help "TikTo Refugees" return to TikTok? The fact that this can be achieved by malicious compliance to ADL censorship request, and perhaps even making a profit in the process, is simply beautiful.
