MAGA-controlled social media is doing the work of book bans by suppressing support for marginalized authors.
If you havenāt seen much from us on TikTok this week, thatās why. Our recent post celebrating and supporting Trans Day of Visibility was shadowbanned.
Itās nothing new: TikTok has long flagged words likeĀ lesbian,Ā gay,Ā transgenderāalongside posts about genocide, social justice, and political resistanceāburying them under the opacity of āsafety guidelines.ā
Whatās changed is the scale and precisionānow with TikTok under the control of Larry Ellison (Trump bff and one of the architects of the surveillance ecosystem), todayās moderation systems are AI-automated with a new agenda.
Weāve already seen posts muted or made unsearchable for using innocuous languageāterms likeĀ anti-capitalist,Ā fascism (anything the administration aims to deem ādomestic terrorismā), even the word "censorship" itself.
Weāre not deleting anything, and weāre not softening our language to appease the algorithm. And weāre especially not walking back our supportāthank you to everyone who helped us raise funds last week for Trans Lifeline and the ACLU.
A huge part of our community gathers on platforms like TikTok and X. We share work and updates there; we support creators thereāmany of them queer writers who are still making content and will not disappear.
We just wanted to mention how fucked it is that one of the largest creative platforms is silencing queer language and the politics of liberation: this is blatant censorship being passed off as "content moderation."
Visibility is resistanceāand writing, naming things as they are, is the first defence. Trans rights are not up for debate, and the words to defend those rights are not going anywhere. - the Ellipsus Team xo

















