Publishing videos on TikTok - first experience report

Setting up video publishing on TikTok is very easy. Also uploading works fine, the videos are available very soon after the upload. 

During the upload there appears the status message that the video is being checked and reviewed, for content that is not allowed. Forbidden is actually all kind of NSFW content. But it turns out that this automatic AI-powered check is quite blind... I was able to upload some things which I would consider NSFW. YouTube has been much stricter and was immediately reacting to such content. It turns out that this is a known issue: officially NSFW is banned as the community guideines state here:

https://www.tiktok.com/community-guidelines/en/sensitive-mature-themes

But users apparently experience this differently, as these examples on Reddit show:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1l0jeho/tiktok_has_a_bunch_of_nsfw_apparently_popping_up/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiktokhelp/comments/1kpx9b5/so_much_fucking_nsfw_and_tiktok_doesnt_do/

This automated review during upload apparently has some flaws. For two of my videos, it did reject my caption in which I did mention that my dolls are made in China. It did not complain when I used exactly the same caption for another video.

There is also a problem when trying to change the cover picture. Since my videos often start with a black scene, fading into something, the initial cover image shows just black. When I wanted to change this after the upload, it reverted back to black. Not sure why... I was so far only able to select a proper cover image during the initial upload process.

The statistics shows some weird things: On the home screen it shows that I have 3 Likes, but in the individual video list there is only one Like. There are 983 views shown, but the total in the graph is only 718. 

There might be an implicit NSFW ban: my video of Marina (top) has no plays / views whatsoever. It is not even undressing or otherwise, but is just a simple pole dancing. The "Audrey is dancing - Part 3" which is the most NSFW of all these videos, does show 3 views - very few, but not 0. So what is going on there?

The first 2 days after the upload the views did rise, as shown in the above screen shot. After that, the numbers remained constant. No new viewers.

So overall a mixed experience. Potentially a very large audience, but with the strange and inconsistent reviewing it is not clear of this audience can be tapped properly. Also, it is not clear if the reported numbers are correct (too few likes).