“Aren’t all ethnic groups supposed to be equal? Why, then, is the use of our language, Tibetan, being restricted?” asks a TikTok user who goes by Youga Ga in a video in Mandarin published on the Douyin video platform. The video quickly disappeared from the platform before being republished on other social media sites not censored by the Chinese Communist Party and accessible from abroad.
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of censoring any political content about Tibetans and other ethnic and religious minorities. At the same time, the Party encourages what might be called cultural content about tourist-friendly things like music, dance and cuisine.
However, in recent weeks, Youga Ga is far from the only person to complain about Douyin’s so-called “ban” on content in the Tibetan language. But like Younga Ga’s video, these posts were quickly removed by the platform.
Douyin hasn’t made a public declaration about banning the Tibetan language, but many posts in Tibetan have been deleted – as have posts about Tibetan culture, according to the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), an NGO based in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile.