Tick Tock For Tiktok

Tiktok has been everywhere. Videos made on the app are shared on Instagram, X, Facebook, and YouTube. The short video app has been in the news for promoting dangerous activities, as well as for privacy concerns. Recently, there's talk of banning Tiktok in the United States if ByteDance doesn't sell it.

Personally, I think that ByteDance should sell Tiktok. They are unable to properly run the app, as all their customer service is done by bots. These bots are allowing things that are obvious Comminity Guidelines violations to remain, while removing accounts that don't break any rules.

I myself was a victim of this. After over a year of emailing Tiktok and appealing their decisions, they decided to claim my account was only suspended and that they restored it, but in reality completely erased it, lying to me. Mostly, the emails back and forth were the bots repeating the same preprogrammed messages to me, some of which even falsely accusing me of violating their guidelines.

If anything, Tiktok is run by hypocrites. They claim to value their Community Guidelines, yet they turn around and blatantly violate said Community Guidelines via their actions. The app needs to be run by actual people in the customer service department, not A.I. Artificial Intelligence is not equipped to handle customer service complaints.

While I don't agree with an outright ban on TikTok, my personal experience with their customer service department has proven the importance of having actual people working customer service. I know it's not a job most real people want, but the truth is, if ByteDance can't provide actual people running their customer service and not bots, then they need to sell TikTok to either a company or individual who can.

TikTok has one of the worst customer service departments that I've ever encountered. Everything from rejecting appeals for alleged nonexistent violations to outright lying. It took me talking about writing this article for TikTok to respond the way they did, claiming to have restored my account when in actuality, they did not. They had actually completely erased my account, but lied to me.

The reason why I didn't give up on getting my TikTok account until now was because one of the things I like to share on social media is my personal experience with different companies' customer service. I firmly believed that I had done nothing wrong (I hadn't), knew their accusations against me were false, patiently shared proof of my innocence, and kept fighting for it. For me, it was important to not give up and to be able to share how long it takes for TikTok to satisfactorily handle a customer service complaint - something that they failed to do.

People who want to argue about freedom of speech seem to have forgotten that a nationwide ban on TikTok isn't an end to social media accessible in the United States. There are still places such as Instagram where one can monetize one's content, along with other places online (and I'm not just talking about OnlyFans). If anything, a nationwide ban on TikTok would actually be a good thing. Banning TikTok in the United States opens the door for an American company or individual to invent a short form video app that can rival TikTok and have a better customer service department than them as well.

In conclusion, TikTok is a cautionary tale about not having customer service completely run by Artificial Intelligence. Real people need to be handling user complaints, not just on TikTok, but also other places both online and offline as well. But, my thoughts on artificial intelligence is another article for another day