It's almost impossible to avoid triggering content on TikTok

It's less of a malicious Black Mirror-like plan to herald the robot takeover and more of an unfortunate oversight in a well-meaning feature. The concept of banning potentially triggering content altogether has sparked debate over whether private companies, like social media platforms, have an obligation to uphold free speech principles. It's also incredibly difficult to moderate this kind of content. TikTok users manage to bypass TikTok's content flags by misspelling certain phrases. Suicide, for example, becomes "suic1de" or in more morbidly lighthearted videos, "aliven't." The tag #thinspo is blocked, but the tag #thinsp0 isn't. Users won't be able to find any content tagged #depression, but #depresion has 498.8 million views.