Here’s the strangest part: there was no evidence that social media companies actually suppressed news of the protest, according to linguist Adam Aleksic, author of the book Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. “Sure, TikTok will prevent clusters of overly political content from clumping together, but they generally do allow protest coverage,” Aleksik said in a video on the subject. “Instead, the ‘music festival’ thing mostly started with people hypercorrecting because they weren’t sure what the algorithm was and was not going to censor.”
Ironically, using the term “music festival” drove people to engage with these videos because they wanted to feel like part of the in-group, which made the videos even more viral, according to Aleksik – and because the “music festival” videos were more popular than regular videos about the protest, it convinced people the censorship was real.
Researchers call this phenomenon the “algorithmic imaginary”. People change their behaviour in response to beliefs about how social media algorithms work. Whether or not these beliefs are correct, this user behaviour ends up moulding the algorithm itself.