Joint strategy calls for social media alliance against suicide content

BEIJING: Popular Chinese-owned Video app TikTok has proposed an alliance with nine other social media platforms to work collectively and rapidly to remove suicide content.

The Chinese-owned app said it had set out its proposal in a letter to the chief executives of Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit.

Vanessa Pappas, CEO of TikTok’s interim noted that each of the platforms had its own policies to take down harmful content and stop its distribution.

“Though, we believe each of our individual efforts to safeguard our own users and the collective community would be boosted significantly through a formal, collaborative approach to early identification and notification amongst 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 out details of a collective approach, “which we believe will help us all 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 especially popular with young teens.

The original video came from a Facebook Livestream and showed an American man taking his own life, according to a warning TikTok sent to users on September 8.

Earlier, TikTok had removed more than 380,000 videos in the United States this year as part of a mission to eliminate hate on the platform.

TikTok also banned some 1,300 accounts for breaking rules against hateful content or behavior and deleted 64,000 comments on similar grounds.

“These numbers don’t reflect a 100 percent success rate in catching every piece of hateful content or behavior, but they do indicate our commitment to action,” TikTok US head of safety Eric Han said in a blog post. “Our goal is to eliminate hate on TikTok.”

TikTok’s effort to combat hate comes as the app defends itself against links to the Chinese government. President Donald Trump has issued executive orders giving TikTok parent company ByteDance, which is based in China, deadlines to stop running the app in the US and divest TikTok.

“TikTok has never provided any US user data to the Chinese government, nor would it do so if asked,” the company said in a recent post. “Any insinuation to the contrary is unfounded and blatantly false.”