TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms, especially among the Gen-Z audience. Its short video format has taken over the world and today, there are people who are using the platform to showcase their talent, their editing skills, for promotions, and mainly to play the influence game. However, a platform with worldwide popularity is obvious to have certain bad actors that put the community at risk and TikTok is actively taking actions to remove those bad actors from the platform to protect its users from consuming the wrong kind of content.
Having said that, TikTok has recently announced to automate detection and removal of content that violate its policies. These contents usually include nudity, violence, misinformation, harassment, and other graphic content. According to a report by Engadget, the social media platform has been testing these new features for quite some time now, the company was involved in tweaking its systems with the new algorithm that can find and take down video content that violates TikTok’s safety policies. Reportedly, the new system is only rolling out in the United States and Canada over the next few weeks and hopefully, after its success, the company will expand the function to more countries.
The algorithm is fairly complicated to carry out an even complicated task that involves actively looking out for posts and content that violate company policies related to nudity, violence, illegal activity, sex, graphic content, regulated goods, and the safety of minors. Anyhow, whenever the system detects a video that fits in any of these above-mentioned categories, it immediately pulls the video down, and then the user who posted that content can appeal. As mentioned in a report by Engadget, users have the ability to flag the videos for manual review as well to be on the safer side of things.
TikTok is aware of the fact that its algorithm and the entire detection and deletion system is not perfect and the accuracy rate is variable. However, it mentions that its automated review feature shall be reserved for content categories where its technology is the highest degree of accuracy. Even with the current algorithm, one out of ten videos have been removed unfairly by the automated system that shouldn’t have been deleted, says TikTok.
Furthermore, the company says that this automation will free up its safety staff to focus on more important aspects like the spread of misinformation, hate speech, harassment, and bullying on the platform. The automation process would sincerely pull down the weight from the company’s shoulders, giving the team a breather to focus on more important tasks to protect the community from such unethical content.
TikTok is doing more than some other social media companies including Facebook to deal with such violations and problems. Hopefully, just like the short-video format has been inspired by TikTok, such actions and updates by the company shall also be accounted for.
