TikTok said Friday that a “random” bug caused view counts of hashtags on its social media platform to stop appearing, including tags for the Black Lives Matter movement and others related to the recent police killing of George Floyd.
The error was first pointed out by a TikTok user who went to upload a video to TikTok and found he was unable to see the tags. The user posted on Twitter yesterday, “TikTok blocked the #blacklivesmatter tag and every single tag related to #GeorgeFloyd. This is disgusting.”
A TikTok spokesperson told TheWrap that view counts of the hashtags #GeorgeFloyd and #BlackLivesMatter have been fixed and video creators will now again see the viewer count of popular tags displayed on the video upload screen. The issue was happening before content was uploaded to the social media site and videos using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter continue to be posted, TikTok added.
TikTok stressed that the issue was not tied to a specific topic and that it affected other tags as well. “This appears to affect words at random, including terms like #cat and #hello,” TikTok said in a statement provided to TheWrap.
“We have identified and resolved an issue that had widely affected the view count displayed on hashtags in the upload stage,” TikTok said. “This bug had temporarily affected view count displays on hashtags at random in the Compose screen only; it did not affect tags, videos, or discovery of uploaded content. We apologize for the confusion this caused for our community.”
See the user complaint below.
We are aware of an issue that is impacting the hashtag view counts displayed at the upload stage. This appears to affect words at random, including terms like #cat and #hello. Our team is investigating and working quickly to address the issue.
— TikTokSupport (@TikTokSupport) May 29, 2020
Sean Burch contributed to this report.