Disney bans TikTok characters from saying "lesbian" or "gay"
Date: 2023-09-05 Author: Karina Ziganova Categories: NEWS 18+
For text-to-speech, TikTok's voice is adapted by Disney, forcing users to make sounds similar to Rocket Raccoon. Words such as "gay", "lesbian" or "squirt" are not allowed.
Some user reports showed the feature not speaking LGBTQ terms before it was quietly changed to allow the words.
It was this feature that allowed words like "bisexual" and "transgender".
Rocket's voice skipped words when normally spelled, but was pronounced phonetically if the user wrote "qweer".
When trying to force it to read text that contained only forbidden words, an error message came up saying that text-to-speech is not supported by the selected language.
The voices that were introduced into the existing text-to-speech feature were shown with support for the Disney Plus promotion and included other characters. For example, the alien Stitch was introduced as one of them: C-3PO.
Neither Disney nor TikTok responded to The Independent's requests for comment prior to publication.
TikTok has been criticized in the past for this approach to LGBTQ users. In 2019, TikTok's moderation policy was found to be "locally sensitive" and bans pro-LGBTQ content - even where homosexuality has never been illegal. According to The Guardian, this censorship policy applies to countries with legal gay racism.
In its announcement, TikTok said it was "a platform for creativity and a commitment to equality-diversity" but said it agreed on the need to create more. He also stated that the guidelines outlined no longer apply.
Since September, terms like "gay", "lesbian" and "transgender" have been categorized as taboo on TikTok for Bosnian or Jordanian users.
It follows that users would have trouble finding these topics due to deprioritization in the application's search algorithm, unless they were explicitly disabled.
At the same time, TikTok reported that some terms were restricted in accordance with local laws and others were restricted for the reason that they were used to search for pornography.
"I'm sorry, we made a mistake," TikTok's director of international policy for Europe and the Middle East, Theo Bertram, added at the committee hearing. “That was a terrible idea,” he added, announcing that the policy had now changed.
