Let’s tie up for a suicide watch, TikTok writes to Facebook, Google, Snapchat, others
TikTok on Tuesday proposed an alliance with nine other social media platforms to work collectively and rapidly to eliminate suicide content, following an incident this month when a man killed himself on Facebook.
The Chinese-owned iphone app said it had lay out its proposal in a letter to the chief executives of Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit.
TikTok’s interim CEO Vanessa Pappas noted that all of the platforms had its policies to take down harmful content and stop its distribution.
“However, we believe your individual efforts to safeguard our very own users and the collective community will be boosted drastically through a formal, collaborative method of early identification and notification between industry participants of extremely violent, graphic content, including suicide,” she wrote in the letter.
Pappas proposed a meeting of safety officers from each company to work through information on a collective approach, “which we believe can help people improve safety for our users”.
TikTok launched its own investigation after clips of the man’s suicide were embedded into otherwise inoffensive videos shared widely on its global platform, which is particularly favored by young teens.
The original video originated from a Facebook livestream and showed an American man taking his own life, 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 persons operating on the dark web, senior TikTok executive Theo Bertram told a British parliamentary hearing on Tuesday.
“Our hearts venture out to the victim in cases like this. But we do assume that we can do things better later on,” said Bertram, who's director of government relations and public policy for the company in Europe.
“We should now set up a partnership around dealing with this sort of content,” he said, noting the proposed alliance would build on existing collaboration by the social media businesses against material showing sexual abuse of children.
Bertram refused to be drawn on TikTok’s travails in the United States, in which a deal to restructure the platform involving Oracle and Walmart is in doubt, following threats by President Donald Trump to shut it down.
The executive insisted the platform, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is free of interference by Beijing, but regretted instances during the past where it has removed content critical of the communist regime.
Such content included references to the plight of Uighur Muslims around Xinjiang, and the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
“There is no political censorship of any sort,” Bertram, a former adviser to British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, told the MPs.
“I accept there are things we’ve got wrong, but I really believe TikTok overwhelmingly is a force once and for good.
Source: www.deccanchronicle.com
