TikTookay CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies earlier than the House Energy and Commerce Committee within the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC.
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To spot and take away offensive posts, TikTookay has tens of hundreds of Ireland-based staff tasked with content material moderation, CEO Shou Zi Chew stated on Thursday.
Speaking on the TED2023 Possibility convention in Vancouver, British Columbia, Chew stated TikTookay has “clear community guidelines” and that executives don’t “make any ad-hoc decisions” when coping with “bad actors” on the web who publish offensive content material on the app.
“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 stated.
TikTookay, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, is below intense strain from U.S. lawmakers who wish to ban the app over considerations it poses a menace to nationwide safety. Chew’s feedback come weeks after the CEO withstood a barrage of robust questioning from U.S. legislators, who’ve additionally criticized TikTookay for failing to stop the unfold of offensive content material on its platform or deal with its contribution to an increase in teenage despair.
“As a company, our goal is not to optimize and maximize time spent,” Chew stated on Thursday, including that when individuals are glued to their smartphone screens TikTookay “will proactively send you videos to tell you to get off the platform.”
The dangerous content material downside just isn’t distinctive to TikTookay. U.S. rivals, together with Meta, mother or father of Facebook and Instagram, and Google’s YouTube, have confronted comparable questions from lawmakers.
Chew stated TikTookay takes the matter significantly.
“We really encourage parents to have these conversations with their teenagers of what is the right amount of screen time,” Chew stated. “I think there’s a healthy relationship that you should have with your screen and, as a business, you know, we believe that that balance needs to be met.”
Chew additionally introduced up TikTookay’s Project Texas initiative, which is on the coronary heart of the corporate’s effort to reassure the general public that the info of U.S. customers will stay on home soil and will not fall into the fingers of international governments, most notably China.
Although TikTookay is partnering with Silicon Valley software program vendor Oracle to retailer and shield person knowledge, U.S. lawmakers stay involved that Beijing might listen in on U.S. residents or probably unfold propaganda through the TikTookay app.
“I can say that we are building all the tools to prevent any of these actions from happening,” Chew stated. “And I’m very confident that with an unprecedented amount of transparency that we’re giving on the platform, we can reduce this risk to as low as zero as possible.”
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Source: www.cnbc.com