Social media giant TikTok has no dedicated content moderators in Australia, instead relying heavily on automated services to identify and remove anti-Semitic content.
The video-based Chinese platform was among a string of tech giants to appear before the Royal Commission into anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack.
TikTok’s global head of policy, trust and safety, Zachary Hecht told a hearing in Sydney on Tuesday that content was assessed multiple times, including at the point of upload by automatic moderation tools.
He revealed that in the first quarter of the year, about 98 per cent of harmful content on the popular app was automatically removed before it could be seen by users in Australia.
But he said that TikTok doesn’t have moderation staff based in Australia and instead relied on automation and English-language teams based elsewhere.
“Within the field of content moderation, I don’t believe that there’s a team that’s dedicated to Australia,” he said.
“Although our approach is to ensure that we have global coverage, we supplement what moderators would know themselves with additional guidance, including for regional differentiation, as well as different types of harms.”
The inquiry also heard that more than 336 million videos were uploaded to the app last year, with at least 270,000 removed for violating safety and civility guidelines.
Mr Hecht also highlighted the growing challenges for platforms to keep up with the evolving language of anti-Semitism as users repackage hate speech, tropes, and prejudices targeting Jewish people into new words, symbols, and codes.
It was a similar issue raised in a testimony on Monday by Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — who claimed “Zionists” was increasingly being used as a coded word to attack Jews.
“Enforcement is always a very large challenge for any platform, and to continue ensuring that our enforcement is keeping up with the new ways that users might be violating our content,” Mr Hecht said.
“I believe the commission has heard about varied ways of sharing anti-Semitic narratives.
“It’s something that we need to stay on top of, both through our own internal mechanisms, as well as the partnership with third-party organisations.
“Our systems are constantly being iterated and evolved to ensure we stay on top of new things that we’re learning.
“We are leveraging signals, emerging keywords, and processes to then inject that into our moderation system.
“I would note that content moderation is not always perfect, and so there are instances where we would not have gotten it right, but as content is viewed more, we take additional steps to continue reviewing it.”
As social media platforms update their algorithms and content moderation policies to detect explicit hate speech, perpetrators adapt by shifting their vocabulary to evade detection. This allows harmful narratives to remain online, bypass automated censors, and spread into mainstream digital spaces.
The commission also heard from Tik Tok’s global head of partnerships, elections and market integrity Valiant Richey later in Tuesday’s session.
He discussed Tik Tok’s direct response to the Bondi Beach terror attack after horrific videos started to flood social media feeds in the massacre’s aftermath.
While Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant last week told the hearing that Elon Musk’s X platform fought to keep Bondi content online, Tik Tok said it had proactively reached out to help Australian authorities.
Mr Richey said that the terror attack had prompted Tik Tok’s “crisis response protocol”.
The protocol includes teams looking through “ shocking and graphic content”, “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” to remove them and prevent further uploads.
It also included contacting the eSafety Commissioner, New South Wales police force and Australian Federal Police force within an hour of the attack.
“It involves activation of a number of different teams,” Mr Richey said.
“They would also be looking at other platforms and seeing what material might be coming up on there, and attempting to use that information to put in preventative measures within our own systems.
“They are teams designed to provide that dynamic response in these moments that are really, really critical to containing trends before they scale up and would reach even our human moderation teams.
“In very rough terms, and this is not a perfect analogy, it’s like our basic police force (the regular moderators) versus a SWAT team (crisis response moderators).”
The third block of the royal commission has been dedicated to examining the role social media platforms and traditional media outlets have played in fuelling anti-Semitism in Australia.
It comes after the Australian Federal Police and spy agency ASIO have warned that the speed users are being radicalised online has shifted to weeks and sometimes even days.
ABC and SBS are expected to appear before the Royal Commission later this week.
Both public broadcasters have chosen not to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism which has been endorsed by the Federal and State Governments.
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