TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | News from Getty Images | Getty Images
To detect and remove objectionable posts, TikTok has hired tens of thousands of Ireland-based employees to moderate content, CEO Shou Zi Chew said Thursday.
At the TED2023 Possibility conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Chew said that TikTok has “clear community guidelines” and that executives don’t make “ad hoc decisions” when dealing with “bad actors” on the internet who post objectionable content on the web app.
“Based on that, we built a team consisting of tens of thousands of people plus machines to identify bad content and actively and proactively remove it from the platform,” Chew said.
TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is under intense pressure from US lawmakers to ban the app over concerns it poses a threat to national security. Chew’s comments come weeks after the CEO withstood a barrage of harsh scrutiny from US lawmakers, who have also criticized TikTok for failing to prevent the spread of objectionable content on its platform or addressing its contribution to a rise in depression among teenagers.
“As a company, it’s not our goal to optimize and maximize time spent,” Chew said Thursday, adding that TikTok will “proactively send them videos to tell them to leave the platform” when people do stuck on their smartphone screens.
The problem of malicious content is not exclusive to TikTok. U.S. competitors, including Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Google’s YouTube, have faced similar questions from lawmakers.
Chew said TikTok is taking the matter seriously.
“We really encourage parents to have these conversations with their teens about what the right amount of screen time is,” Chew said. “I think there’s a healthy relationship you should have with your screen and we as a company believe that balance needs to be struck.”
Chew also brought up TikTok’s Project Texas initiative, which is at the heart of the company’s efforts to reassure the public that US users’ data stays on domestic soil and does not fall into the hands of foreign governments, particularly China become.
Though TikTok is working with Silicon Valley software provider Oracle to store and protect user data, US lawmakers remain concerned that Beijing could spy on US citizens or potentially spread propaganda about the TikTok app.
“I can say that we are developing all the tools to prevent any of these actions from happening,” Chew said. “And I’m very confident that with an unprecedented level of transparency that we offer on the platform, we can reduce that risk to as little as possible.”
REGARD: How the TikTok ban benefits other social media giants like Meta and Twitter