TikTok, TikTok, your time is nearly up

In order to moderate accurately, many companies use human moderators to filter their platform for inappropriate content like nudity, child and sexual abuse, and weapons or drug paraphernalia. The amount of content seen by human moderators has increased significantly since the beginning of social media platforms like Facebook. In 2009, Facebook only employed 12 human moderators to deal with any content that may be unsuitable coming from their 120 million users, however by 2018 not only had their users increased to 2.3 billion active monthly users, but as a result so too did their amount of human moderators- from 12 to 15,000. That’s an increase of 124,900%!! [1]

With the amount of users that Facebook has you can imagine how much content that they are having to moderate everyday, and the effect that that would have on their mental health. In a previous blog, we went into more detail about moderation and the effect on Facebook’s moderators, and in this blog we will be talking about the changes that TikTok have made to their moderation process, in order to make their platform ‘safer’.

What are these changes?

Last week, TikTok announced that they would be investing in new technology that will remove nudity and violence from the platform. This social video creating and sharing app has grown significantly in popularity during the Coronavirus pandemic, and as it has grown, so have the number of unwanted videos being uploaded.

By allowing their human moderators to move away from reviewing every video, TikTok are trying to limit the amount of stress and any mental health issues that may occur from seeing so much explicit content. Not only that but they are trying to make this process quicker. Additionally, TikTok claim that now this technology is in place, that their human moderators will be able to focus on more context based violation such as bullying, harassment, ‘fake news’ and any hate speech videos — focusing not just on content that may be harmful to children but to anyone who uses the social platform.

After nearly a year in the works, TikTok have finally decided that their technology for removing this unwanted content is ready to be launched, but what’s the catch? Well it’s only going to be rolled out in the US and Canada. But wait, there’s more…

Any videos that TikTok claims to violate their terms, any illegal activity, drugs etc, will be removed by their technology, yes, but only once it has been uploaded to the app itself. This means no matter how quick the technology may be, there are bound to be explicit and illegal videos viewed by young children and vulnerable people before they are taken down. Furthermore, once a video is uploaded there are ways to capture, save, and share outside of TikTok, so this inappropriate or illegal content will still be on the internet. Considering how CSAM, sexploitation, and blackmail can cause such immeasurable harm to its victims, we certainly think it’s better to never have the content be uploaded in the first place, rather than retroactively dealing with the problem. For ‘creators’ whose video has been removed and reported to the system, they will have the opportunity to appeal to TikTok’s human moderators as to why the video should be reinstated onto the platform.

The platform’s automated systems recently flagged content relating to the Black Lives Matter movement as inappropriate, removing it from the platform, but even with just a cursory browse of recent TikTok uploads, we still think there is far too much being allowed as uploads in the first place. We can only hope that with their ‘new’ software in place that human moderators can ensure appropriate content is available on the platform, and removal of explicit and inappropriate videos will help to educate users on what is allowed if they didn’t read the terms, at least in North America anyway.

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/17302/facebook-content-moderator/