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 1000’s of Ireland-based staff tasked with content material moderation, CEO Shou Zi Chew mentioned on Thursday.
Speaking on the TED2023 Possibility convention in Vancouver, British Columbia, Chew mentioned TikTookay has “clear community guidelines” and that executives don’t “make any ad-hoc decisions” when coping with “bad actors” on the Internet who put up 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 mentioned.
TikTookay, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, is beneath intense stress from U.S. lawmakers, who wish to ban the app over over issues that it poses a menace to nationwide safety. Chew’s feedback come weeks after the CEO withstood a barrage of powerful questioning from U.S. legislators, who’ve additionally criticized TikTookay for failing to stop the unfold of offensive content material on its platform or tackle its contribution to an increase in teenage despair.
“As a company, our goal is not to optimize and maximize time spent,” Chew mentioned on Thursday, including that, when persons are glued to their smartphone screens TikTookay “will proactively send you videos to tell you to get off the platform.”
The dangerous content material drawback just isn’t distinctive to TikTookay. U.S. rivals together with Meta, guardian of Facebook Instagram, and Google’s YouTube have confronted comparable questions from lawmakers.
Chew mentioned TikTookay takes the matter critically.
“We really encourage parents to have these conversations with their teenagers of what is the right amount of screen time,” Chew mentioned. “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 arms of overseas governments, most notably China.
Although TikTookay is partnering with Silicon Valley software program vendor Oracle to retailer and shield person information, U.S. lawmakers are nonetheless involved that the Chinese authorities might listen in on U.S. residents or doubtlessly unfold propaganda by way of the TikTookay app.
“I can say that we are building all the tools to prevent any of these actions from happening,” Chew mentioned. “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 at zero as possible.”
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Source: www.cnbc.com”