TikTok CEO Reveals the Details of Platform’s Massive Censorship Operation

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew revealed on Thursday that the social media platform has “tens of thousands” of employees dedicated to content moderation.

American lawmakers have raised concerns over allegations that information on TikTok, which is controlled by Chinese technology company ByteDance, can be manipulated by associates of the Chinese Communist Party. Some have also noted that TikTok is one of several large social media sites which tend to censor conservative viewpoints. Chew affirmed in an interview at a TED conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, that his company has a massive content moderation operation based in Ireland which uses artificial intelligence systems to censor posts.

“There are some bad actors who come on the internet, they post bad content. Our approach is that we have very clear community guidelines. We’re very transparent about what is allowed and what is not allowed on our platform. No executives make any ad hoc decisions,” Chew said. “Based on that, we have built a team that is tens of thousands of people plus machines in order to identify content that is bad, and actively, proactively remove it from the platform.”

Chew added that the content moderation staffers constitute “one of the most important cost items” at his firm but are “completely worth” the expense. He admitted that human personnel are necessary since the AI systems used by his company are “not perfect.”

“You have to complement them with a lot of human beings,” he continued. “A lot of the progress in AI in general is making that kind of content moderation capabilities a lot better. We’re going to get more precise, we’re going to get more specific.” (Read more from “TikTok CEO Reveals the Details of Platform’s Massive Censorship Operation” HERE)

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