TikTok, formerly Musical.ly has deleted almost 400,000 videos on its social networking and content creation platform over what it termed as actions to counter hateful behavior. In a blog post authored by its head of safety, Eric Han, the action to take down these videos form part of an update in the apps new policy to better account for scenarios that make others feel excluded or marginalized. “It’s our job to remain vigilant for the sake and safety of our community,” Han writes.
“Since the start of 2020, we’ve removed more than 380,000 videos in the US for violating our hate speech policy. We also banned more than 1,300 accounts for hateful content or behavior, and removed over 64,000 hateful comments,” the blog post goes ahead to say. Worthy of note is that in 2019, only 2years after ByteDance ltd acquired Musical.ly and renamed the app TikTok, 49 million videos were removed between July and December 2019. The majority of these videos were taken down for “adult nudity & sexual activities,” according to the apps Transparency report released just last month. Also, for involving alcohol, drug use or suicide, videos were taken down. At the time, only 1% of videos on TikTok were removed for including hate speech or something similar.
Now, the company says if a slur is being used hatefully, it doesn’t belong on TikTok. “We acknowledge that… language previously used to exclude and demean groups of people is now being reclaimed by these communities and used as terms of empowerment and counterspeech. Educating our content moderation teams on these important distinctions is ongoing work, and we strive to get this right for our users,” adding that while they expect to be held accountable for any shortcomings and progress, they “will continue to improve (their) policies, processes, and products that keep TikTok a place where everyone feels welcome.”
Last month, India banned the app from being used in its country and the US president Donald Trump has also accused the owners of TikTok of providing information to China; an allegation the company has denied time and again.
