Mischievous Tricks: Circumventing TikTok’s Community Guidelines Through Abusive and Sexual Language among Indonesian TikTokers
TikTok, neologisms, avoidance register, modernising content, digital semiotics
Abstract
In this modern era, TikTok has implemented strict rules to sterilise AI products on digital platforms. At the same time, the number of interactions has been increasing, and there are complex patterns of neologisms among TikTok users, such as the utilisation of “special codes” to hide abusive as well as sexual language and avoid registration guidelines. This study aims to scrutinise the linguistic resistance of Indonesian TikTokers in developing a specific competency in an avoidance register to keep sexual and illegal content circulating under the radar of TikTok detection. Specifically, this research focuses on the “Plat Jambi” and “Logo Tesla” phenomena as visual and digital symbols to demonstrate the failure of the ontological moderation system. This study employs digital ethnography and an algorithmic audit to map the linguistic strategies and symbols used to circumvent community guidelines. Our findings reveal a hierarchical avoidance pattern, namely, orthographic manipulation of text, the creation of morphological neologisms (e.g., Tobrut and Ichibos), and the use of high-context cultural metaphors. This study also found that global content moderation suffers from cultural illiteracy, in which AI operating under low-context logic fails to detect violations embedded in local neologisms and subversive layers of connotative meaning.
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