MAGA-controlled social media is doing the work of book bans by suppressing support for marginalized authors.
If you haven’t seen much from us on TikTok this week, that’s why. Our recent post celebrating and supporting Trans Day of Visibility was shadowbanned.
It’s nothing new: TikTok has long flagged words like lesbian, gay, transgender—alongside posts about genocide, social justice, and political resistance—burying them under the opacity of “safety guidelines.”
What’s changed is the scale and precision—now with TikTok under the control of Larry Ellison (Trump bff and one of the architects of the surveillance ecosystem), today’s moderation systems are AI-automated with a new agenda.
We’ve already seen posts muted or made unsearchable for using innocuous language—terms like anti-capitalist, fascism (anything the administration aims to deem “domestic terrorism”), even the word "censorship" itself.
We’re not deleting anything, and we’re not softening our language to appease the algorithm. And we’re especially not walking back our support—thank 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 there—many 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 resistance—and 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
