He who must not be named

I joined TikTok as a mechanism to sell more books. In marketing, my chief aim has been not to bore, but amuse or intrigue. In that respect, I have some competition on TikTok. Within a minute of signing up I had a home page bouncing with whirling body parts, mostly bums and wide, wide grins ranging from earnest to puzzled— as if to say what am I doing here? Not all grins were puzzled, mind, some were positively enticing, but it wasn’t exactly what I’d signed up to. But then again, needs must. If it sells books, I thought grimly. I can twirl bottoms with the best of them and my grin is magnificent.

And then, at last, the sanity of BookTok.

On the first day, I had 2 followers. Five days later I had 108 followers. Some people have 2K followers and counting, so there’s some way to go. 

That is if I’m allowed to stay on Tik Tok. Within three days I had three videos removed – essentially the same one as I struggled to understand what was wrong with them and tried to work out what to remove. Initially, I just reposted it, thinking they’d made a mistake. But algorithms don’t make mistakes. They’re imbued with an infallibility popes can envy but not emulate.

 So than I wondered whether it was the blurb, referring to The Gift: ‘An occult Downton Abbey involving Satanists, aristocrats, and Nazis.’ Could it be the Chinese owned Tik Tok with its own explementary record objected to the word ‘Nazis’? My third and final posting removed the blurb, but it was still banned with the warning that I would likely be banned too if any such thing happened again.

 Look at the video. Presumably they’re not objecting to Tredegar House, it can only be the one second glimpse of a moody looking Hitler in pin-up pose. Out of interest, I looked up Hitler on the Tik Tok site and immediately got the community guidelines message warning me off. Then, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I looked up Stalin and Pol Pot. I didn’t look up Mao Tse Tung, fearing a Tiananmen Square response. No problem: Stalin and Pol Pot both feature on Tik Tok. 

A lazy algorithm perhaps or else Tik Tok fears it's in danger of imaginative Nazis with rotating bottoms and appealing grins are poised to take over the site. As it stands it appears that  Tik Tok has slipped into the Harry Potter universe with its own equivalent of Voldemort - ‘He who must not be named’?