Kfir Bibas – baby hostage held by Hamas in Gaza
TikTok, the popular, as well as controversial, social media platform known for offering a variety of entertaining videos, has been working hard to improve its image. American politicians are attempting to ban it, saying that TikTok is a tool of the Chinese government used for spying on people, and others have pointed out that in the wake of the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel, the company allowed people to make inflammatory posts filled with hateful rhetoric against the Jewish State. And even when trying to prove it has taken action to remove such hate speech, TikTok refused even to acknowledge the massacre.
On the occasion of the six-month anniversary of the barbaric Hamas attack, TikTok provided a further update on its work to “help maintain the safety of our community and the integrity of our platform.” Interestingly, the company made no mention of the massacre, instead referring only to the Israel-Hamas war.”
TikTok is a popular social media app known for short-form videos. Users can watch and create videos that range in length from 3 seconds to 10 minutes, covering a wide variety of topics including comedy, dance, education, DIY, food, and more.
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As with Instagram, users can “go viral” and make a lot of money from advertising if they make posts that become popular enough. These people are known as “influencers.”
However, TikTok has also become known for allowing the proliferation of disinformation – patently false reports and unsubstantiated statements about subjects like medicine and science – as well as hate speech. In the aftermath of the October 7 massacre it became a platform for outright lies about Israel ranging from accusing the country of enacting a genocide in Gaza to denying the October 7 attack even took place. This was also true of other social media services like Twitter and Instagram.
As for such posts, TikTok said that in the six months since October 7, 2023, it removed more than 3.1 million videos and suspended more than 140,000 livestreams in Israel and the Palestinian areas for “violating our Community Guidelines, including content promoting Hamas, hate speech, violent extremism and misinformation.” Globally, in the same time period, it removed tens of millions of pieces of content.
The company provided a graph showing that since October 7, 2023, it removed 31.5 million posts it said were guilty of “harassment and bullying,” 27.5 million posts that contained “shocking and graphic” content, 8.5 million posts that expressed “violent or hateful” remarks directed towards organizations or individuals, 8.6 million posts that contained “hate speech,” and much more.
Unfortunately, TikTok did not provide any further breakdown of these items, nor any data on posts that were anti-Semitic or directed against Israel specifically.
“We continue to take robust action against deceptive behaviors too,” said TikTok adding that in the six months since the start of the war (again no reference to the massacre), it has removed more than 320 million fake accounts globally, along with their content.
“As we said when the war first started, we immediately mobilized resources to help us improve both our proactive automated detection and strengthen our moderation teams, as we countered these new and evolving risks,” added TikTok. “Thanks to improvements we made to machine moderation models when the war started, we saw an immediate 234% increase in the violative comments removed in Israel and Palestine by this technology.”
Again, there was no breakdown as to what share of this was directed against Jews and Israel, nor were any examples of the items provided by TikTok.
