Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship. It’s a shame because the site is immensely popular and that means it is full of very interesting content. Yet, this is far from the first unreasonable thing they’ve been removing. It’s well known how Tiktok users came up with alternative words to circumvent words that were likely to get their content removed (e.g., “unalived” instead of “killed”).
You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there’s utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they’ll only use one.