TikTok censorship department employs ‘tens of thousands’, says CEO

TikTok employs tens of thousands who are responsible for censoring “offensive” content on the platform, according to CEO Shou Zi Chew.

In a TED interview this month Chew opened up about his large censorship operation which is led by a group in Ireland.

“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.”

The army of censors is “one of the most important cost items” at the company, said Chew, but is “completely worth it”.

Chew also said that while he does employ some AI in his censorship operation, the technology is not yet developed to the point of full automation.

“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.”

The censorship team at TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, will now add “climate change misinformation” to the list of things prohibited on the platform. The short-form video app said it will remove any such content and will redirect users instead to an “authoritative” information source.

The policy change, which took effect this month, aims to “help reduce harmful climate change misinformation while elevating authoritative information year-round.” It will apply not only to content suggesting that climate change does not exist, but even content that disagrees with the “scientific consensus” about what is causing “climate change”.

“April 21, we will begin to ramp up enforcement of a new climate change misinformation policy which removes climate change misinformation that undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as content denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it,” wrote the Chinese-owned platform in a blog post Wednesday. “As we do for all misinformation policies, we will work with independent fact-checking partners when applying this policy to help assess the accuracy of content.”

These independent fact-checking partners involve many of the same organizations that labeled COVID-19 content “misinformation” and flagged it for removal. The largest of these fact-checkers, PolitiFact, has been a frequent purveyor of misinformation. It is owned by The Poynter Institute, which is funded by globalist billionaire George Soros, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google and YouTube, among others.