In honor of Black History Month, TikTok held a virtual meet and greet with Nicki Minaj on Feb. 8, though this received backlash from Black content creators for giving opportunities to non-Black attendees over its Black users. The virtual event was meant to serve as a collaborative effort to discuss and brainstorm content ideas, as well as to give users the chance to meet Nicki and preview her new music. According to BuzzFeed, the event was “dominated” by non-Black voices and failed to address the Black content creators it should have served.

“I don’t see how inviting a celebrity or creating an event last minute and sending the invite to people who aren’t Black makes sense for a Black History Month event,” content creator Erick Louis told BuzzFeed, who is just on the brink of 1 million followers on the app. “I feel like there’s no due diligence and really catering to the Black creators on their app even when it comes to something as simple as setting up an event, paying respect to the culture, the architects, and the people who run the trends,” he added.

In response to many complaints filed by Black users, TikTok responded by acknowledging that there’s still much work to be done when it comes to making the app more inclusive of Black voices. “We fell short of providing the experience we intended and we are profoundly sorry for the negative impact caused by our missteps,” a spokesperson for the platform said in a statement.

Though it isn’t unusual for platforms to cater their algorithms to match the interests of its users, interestingly, TikTok was found to harbor racial bias in a series of experiments conducted by artificial intelligence expert Marc Faddoul, who told Forbes that a user’s algorithm is based on a person’s physical appearance in that it recommends accounts that are similar to the accounts they were already following — a term widely used and known to be called collaborative filtering.

“What’s problematic about the collaborative filtering,” Faddoul told Forbes, is that it “may also reproduce whatever bias there is in people’s behavior.”

Faddoul’s experiments concluded that if he followed “a white woman with blonde hair, a series of TikTok users who looked the same would populate as his recommendations.” On the other hand, if Faddoul followed “an Asian man, similarly, other accounts of Asian men would show up in his recommendations.” TikTok isn’t known as the only social media platform to do this, as other platforms such as Instagram adopt the same tactics. Though TikTok is no stranger to using algorithms to pivot the platform’s content suggestions, collaborative featuring does prove why Black TikTok users might have been subjected to garnering less visibility. “If the majority of popular creators on TikTok are white, for example, this can prevent creators of color with smaller followings from being seen and recommended as often on the platform,” Forbes reports.

Racial bias and double standards are no new feat when it comes to living the Black experience, and in this case, a Black TikTok content creator recently disclosed her own experience when seeing and experiencing a double standard that many Black creatives experience on social media.

TikTok user Tiahra Nelson recently shared her experience with the platform after a few of her videos were removed due to going against community guidelines. Nelson recalled that one of her videos addressed how she felt about non-Black people using the n-word, whereas another one of her videos touched upon comedic memes related to the Black experience. What shocked Nelson wasn’t the fact that her videos were taken down but that she came across a video posted by another TikTok user that directly degraded the Black community and hadn’t been removed from the platform.

“When I came across [a] girl’s video that degraded the African American community, I couldn’t comprehend why it continued to appear on the For You page because based on TikTok’s community guidelines, the video should’ve been taken down,” she said in a statement.

During one of the most racially charged times in modern history, the murder of George Floyd shook the nation and the world at large. What began as an uprise in allies, awareness and recognition of police brutality in America, resulted in a movement like no other. Millions of platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and others, joined the uprise of content creators calling for justice and equality, but where was TikTok through all of this? And why did it take for the platform to be called out publicly for them to realize that they failed the Black community?

On June 2, 2020, Black content creators joined together in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd to participate in a worldwide protest entitled Blackout Tuesday. On this day, millions of social media users changed their profile pics to Black images and took a break from social media to promote awareness of ongoing racial disparities in America. Coincidentally, TikTok users reported a technical glitch that inhibited posts with the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd from being uploaded, seen and engaged with. The company responded shortly after with a letter directly to the Black community, stating that the glitch was not intentional, but that they recognized the complaints and the suspicions from its Black users.

“This was a display issue only that widely affected hashtags at large, and powerful videos with the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag continued to be uploaded, viewed, and engaged with,” said Vanessa Pappas, TikTok U.S. general manager, and Kudzi Chikumbu, director of creator community. “Nevertheless, we understand that many assumed this bug to be an intentional act to suppress the experiences and invalidate the emotions felt by the Black community. And we know we have work to do to regain and repair that trust.”

What all began as a love for superheroes later led TikTok user Charles Conley to start important conversations related to equality and social justice reform through cosplay. Conley noticed huge disparities within the superhero and comic space and wanted to be a voice for change, as a result of not commonly seeing superheroes that looked like him. He decided to join TikTok back in 2020 to further these conversations but was met with an unfortunate experience as a Black content creator. Shortly after uploading, Conley’s videos often received racist comments calling him a monkey and the n-word, and he also received private messages that told him to kill himself. Rather than TikTok banning the accounts for going against community guidelines, the app later banned Conley for unspecified community guideline violations after he publicly called out other accounts for racist posts. Conley’s comments were either flagged or viewed as harassment, whereas the racist posts would remain unscathed by the platform.

After Conley’s TikTok was removed, he decided to make another page, where he was further targeted by the platform after posting a commentary video about a white user piercing their ears with a livestock tagging gun. Though Conley’s video was taken down for “dangerous acts” as a part of TikTok’s community guidelines, it was later revealed by the platform that he in fact did not violate the company’s rules.

“It’s so draining,” he told the LA Times. “Having an application … actively sabotaging you and not backing you up, or saying that you are the perpetrator of these transgressions or aggressions — it gets beyond tiring.”

As one of the world’s leading platforms within the social media space, TikTok has proven time and time again that it does not prioritize the Black community and the content creators it serves.