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TikTok Weighed Censoring Shopping Platform After Damaging Report About Its Exec

The social-media giant claimed the censorship ultimately never happened.

After the Financial Times published a damaging report about one of its e-commerce executives, TikTok considered a foolproof measure to mitigate its impact: censorship. In FT’s report, published Tuesday, TikTok Europe’s e-commerce boss Joshua Ma argued he “didn’t believe” in employees taking maternity leave. While Ma has since announced he would step back from his role and take a leave of absence, a document shared internally within the company (and leaked to FT) suggested censoring keywords such as “Financial Times,” “Joshua Ma,” “maternity,” and “toxic” on the TikTok Shop platform to help weaken the report’s impact. TikTok said the idea was never put in place. “Although we welcome and encourage independent ideas from team members, not all ideas are implemented and this one was never under consideration,” the platform told the British daily.