TikTok has launched its own investigation after clips of the man’s suicide were embedded in videos
London, United Kingdom:
TikTok on Tuesday proposed an alliance with nine other social media platforms to work collectively and quickly to remove suicidal content, following an incident this month when a man took his own life on Facebook.
The Chinese-owned app said it presented its proposal in a letter to the CEOs of Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit.
TikTok interim CEO Vanessa Pappas noted that each of the platforms had their own policies to remove harmful content and stop its distribution.
“However, we believe that each of our individual efforts to protect our own users and the collective community would be significantly boosted by a formal and collaborative approach of early identification and notification among industry participants of extremely violent graphic content. , including suicide, ”she wrote. in the letter.
Pappas proposed a meeting of security officials from each company to work out the details of a collective approach, “which we believe will help all of us to improve the security of our users.”
TikTok has launched its own investigation after clips of the man’s suicide were incorporated into otherwise harmless videos widely shared on its global platform, which is particularly popular with young teens.
The original video was from a Facebook livestream and showed an American committing suicide, according to a warning TikTok sent to users on September 8.
Mea culpa
The video was uploaded to various social media platforms after a “coordinated attack” by people operating on the dark web, TikTok top executive Theo Bertram said on Tuesday at a UK parliamentary hearing.
“Our hearts are with the victim in this case. But we believe we can do things better in the future,” said Bertram, director of government relations and public policy for the company in Europe.
“We now need to partner around this type of content,” he said, noting that the proposed alliance would build on existing collaboration of social media companies against content showing child sexual abuse. .
Bertram refused to get caught up in TikTok’s struggles in the United States, where a platform restructuring deal involving Oracle and Walmart is in doubt, following threats from President Donald Trump to shut it down.
The executive insisted the platform, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, was free from interference from Beijing, but lamented instances in the past where it had removed critical content from the Communist regime.
This content included references to the plight of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region and the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
“There is no political censorship of any kind,” Bertram, a former adviser to British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, told MPs.
“I accept that there are things that we have wrong, but I believe TikTok is largely a force for good.”
(This story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
