My journey on TikTok Shop started out with a search for “hip hop jewelry.” It’s an innocuous search query multiple users have likely typed in, hoping to find something to wear. While browsing the cheap jewelry, I was struck by what TikTok’s algorithm repeatedly suggested that I might also be interested in: jewelry with blatant Nazi symbolism.
TikTok continues to struggle with moderation as its in-app ecommerce store gains traction with younger users. Last year, the social media platform removed multiple antisemitic products from its store. Most recently, many users who were scrolling through videos on their For You pages expressed outrage when a swastika necklace, under the name “hiphop titanium steel pendant,” was promoted to them in late December as an on-sale product in TikTok Shop that cost $8.
The platform eventually removed the product as some users who claimed to encounter the suggested item on their feed shared screenshots in viral social media posts.
Despite TikTok removing that necklace, my investigation into TikTok Shop uncovered an algorithmic web of far-right product search suggestions that nudged me toward white nationalist and Nazi-related terms. In the dedicated shopping tab on TikTok, I looked for products to buy and followed what the algorithm recommended to me in the “Others searched for” boxes. This recommendation box sometimes appears in TikTok’s mobile app as a set of four related search suggestions, each with a picture, as users look for products and scroll through what’s available on TikTok Shop.
TikTok spokesperson Glenn Kuper confirms that the type of search suggestions seen in my reporting violate the company’s policies. He says TikTok is currently working to remove these algorithmic suggestions from the app, in response to a detailed list of questions from WIRED.
Kuper also highlights TikTok Shop’s safety report, which states that the ecommerce platform removed 700,000 sellers and 200,000 restricted or prohibited products in the first half of 2025.
Buddhists widely used manji symbols, which can often look identical to swastikas, for thousands of years before the Nazis. Even so, the necklace that was promoted in December included a detail suggesting the piece of jewelry was so widely seen because it was potentially part of an attempt at trolling by extremists, rather than a cultural misunderstanding.
Joan Donovan, the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and coauthor of the book Meme Wars, encountered the viral necklace first-hand in her feed. In this context, Donovan says, the necklace’s description hints at “HH,” an abbreviation of the “Heil Hitler” slogan widely used by Nazis. For her, what differentiated the swastika necklace was a dog-whistle tucked in the product’s description: “hiphop.”
“The labeling is what tells me that this is put up by someone who’s interested more in the rage-baiting aspect,” she says. While this “hiphop” connection may sound like a stretch at first, TikTok Shop’s algorithm suggested I look up products related to Nazi symbolism multiple times over the past month while searching for “hiphop jewelry” and variations of that search with different spacing and phrasing.
For example, the top term TikTok highlighted in the dedicated ecommerce tab as a product that others users searched for was “swatika jewelry,” a misspelling of swastika—next to an $11 set of rhinestone-covered chains.
After I tapped on this initial suggested search for “swatika jewelry,” TikTok highlighted searches on the next page that were even more explicitly inflammatory. TikTok Shop showed me the phrase “german ww2 necklace” next to the image of a Star of David pendant. As I continued clicking on more product searches that TikTok suggested, the web of Nazi-related terms seemed endless.
A non-exhaustive list of phrases TikTok Shop suggested I should also look up during this investigation included: “double lighting bolt necklace,” “ss necklace,” “german necklace swastik,” and “hh necklace.”
Although the search algorithm was clear with its suggestions, the product results TikTok Shop served me were less blatant and often plausibly deniable as not being connected to antisemitism when removed from this context. As an example, one necklace in the product results had S-like lightning bolts on top of each other, rather than the side-by-side arrangement seen in the “SS” insignia of the Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary group that operated in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.
“We have general ideas about how these algorithms work,” says Filippo Menczer, a professor at Indiana University and faculty director of the Observatory on Social Media. “But the exact details of what they implemented at any given time in any of their products are opaque. Nobody is going to be able to tell you exactly why those recommendations are made.”
Without more insights into TikTok’s secretive algorithm, it’s impossible to ascertain exactly how this web of Nazi-related search terms originated. Menczer theorizes that the suggested search results I encountered could be either the algorithm “working as intended,” where it connects potentially related organic search terms, or “some kind of manipulation” by nefarious users, where fake accounts may be used to try to trick an algorithm by boosting certain search terms in an effort to astroturf their popularity. When reached for comment, TikTok’s Kuper stated that the platform has protective policies, which include search results.
Donovan sees TikTok as having a lot of work left to do when it comes to content moderation and user protection. “They really need to dig in, do an investigation, and understand where it’s coming from. And also provide transparency, so that users understand how they were targeted,” she says.
The post TikTok Shop Showed Me Search Suggestions for Products With Nazi Symbolism appeared first on Wired.
