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| TikTok presents an alliance to fight harmful content |
With web apps coming under fire ranging from misinformation to privacy concerns, ByteDance said Tuesday, TikTok is proposing to form a global coalition of social media companies to discover and eliminate harmful content early. Maybe.
The app is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and has been at the center of the political battle between Washington and Beijing. The app sent information to 9 companies looking for agreements on harmful content.
These messages establish a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that encourages companies to warn about harmful and violent content.
The short video app states the following: The content of each platform can be reviewed in an official and collaborative manner, without mentioning the company they are communicating with. However, an inter-company meeting is recommended to discuss this issue.
Social media platforms have recently faced challenges in providing clear suicide-related content, while TikTok has sought to limit its circulation by removing original content and reducing posting or sharing.
TikTok believes that identifying and alerting violent content among industry participants through a formal and collaborative approach will greatly improve individual efforts to protect users.
The app is a relatively new app in the social media arena, and the content restriction scandal has engulfed larger and more mature competitors like Facebook and Twitter, making it less publicly important.
Additionally, TikTok announced today (Tuesday) that in the first half of this year, more than 104 million videos were removed from its platform for violating its Terms of Service.
TikTok said in its transparency report for the first half of 2020, TikTok discovered and deleted 96.4% of these videos before informing the user, and 90.3% of them were deleted before watching them.
The app said it received 1,768 requests for user data from US law enforcement agencies, including 290, or 16.4%.
Bytedance is working around the clock to avoid TikTok being removed after a dispute with the US government. US officials have expressed concern about the app's use to transfer the personal information of as many as 100 million Americans to the Chinese Communist government.