AP Photo/Jessica Hill TikTok is looking to shed its Chinese roots even more.

TikTok released an updated set of community guidelines on Wednesday.

Its rules now explicitly ban “content that denies well-documented and violent events have taken place.” This includes Holocaust denial and other similar conspiracy theories, a spokesman confirmed to Business Insider.

TikTok appears to be trying to sidestep moderation problems that have plagued large social media companies like Facebook and YouTube.

Last year internal documents leaked by The Guardian showed that TikTok moderators were directed to remove content likely to upset the Chinese government, including mentions of Tiananmen Square.

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TikTok released a new set of updated community guidelines on Wednesday, and among them is a rule explicitly banning content that “denies well-documented and violent events have taken place.”

The rule falls under the “hateful ideology” section in the new guidelines, and would apply to Holocaust denial, a TikTok spokesman confirmed to Business Insider.

How social media companies deal with conspiracy theories rooted in bigotry has become a thorny issue for social media companies.

In a 2018 interview Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he wouldn’t ban Holocaust denial on Facebook. “I find [Holocaust denialism] deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong,” Zuckerberg said.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg’s stance has drawn sharp criticism from civil rights organisations like the Anti-Defamation League, and continues to do so. Actor Sacha Baron Cohen attacked Zuckerberg in a speech at the ADL late last year. “We have, unfortunately, millions of pieces of evidence for the Holocaust – it is an historical fact. And denying it is not some random opinion. Those who deny the Holocaust aim to encourage another one,” Baron Cohen said.

YouTube has also struggled with deluges of conspiracy theories proliferating on the site. It wasn’t until June last year that YouTube put an explicit ban on Holocaust denial. And right-wing YouTuber Alex Jones was sued by the parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, after peddling conspiracy theories on his show that the attack was a hoax. YouTube subsequently booted Alex Jones from its site, and the conspiracy videos are no longer visible.

TikTok also confirmed that its new rule would also apply to Sandy Hook conspiracies.

By including this line in its community guidelines TikTok appears to be setting itself apart from older Silicon Valley behemoths like Facebook and YouTube.

However, TikTok has had its own problems with historical erasure.

Last year The Guardian viewed guideline documents for TikTok moderators that directed them to remove content that could upset the Chinese government, including mentions of Tiananmen Square and the Cambodian genocide. TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.

Responding at the time, TikTok said the guidelines in question were outdated, and it had taken a “blunt approach to minimising conflict” in its early days.

Reports of Beijing-friendly censorship is one of the elements of TikTok’s Chinese ownership which has placed it in the crosshairs of US lawmakers. TikTok has been making concerted attempts to reassure America, publishing its first ever transparency report last week and claiming it received more censorship requests from the US than from China in 2019.

Enforcing the new guidelines and actually monitoring the app for conspiracy theories may also be tricky. A spokesman declined to say how many moderators TikTok deploys, and would only say that the number has grown over the past year.

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