Five things we learned from TikTok\u2019s first ever grilling by politicians PixabayDespite repeatedly declining to testify in front of Congress \u2013 which may partly have contributed to the situation that has seen TikTok forced to give away 20% of its company to Oracle and Walmart in the oddest business deal of the year \u2013 TikTok was quizzed by politicians in the UK. The Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee, a collection of politicians akin to a UK version of a Congressional hearing, questioned Theo Bertram, TikTok\u2019s European head of public policy, for more than 90 minutes on September 22. There was a lot of heat, some light \u2013 and plenty of light relief, as the politicians showed they struggled to understand some key elements of the app and its technology. Here\u2019s what we learned. Where is TikTok storing UK user data? In response to @DamianGreen, TikTok responded that data was stored in the US and Singapore. We were questioning TikTok as part of our ‘Online Harms & the Ethics of Data’ inquiry. Watch in full: https:\/\/t.co\/wojWToSyM6 pic.twitter.com\/JdDIDu5QXm \u2014 Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsCMS) September 22, 2020 1.6 million videos are posted on TikTok in the UK alone every day In response to questioning from politicians, Bertram told the committee that in the first six months of 2020, TikTok users in the UK posted more than 300 million videos to the app \u2013 equating to 1.6 million every single day. That\u2019s a huge number, though perhaps not surprising: we know from leaked information published by Business Insider that an estimated five million videos are uploaded every hour worldwide. Nearly half of TikTok\u2019s UK employees are content moderators The app published its transparency report just two hours before the hearing began, showing that 105 million videos were taken down from the platform in the first six months of 2020 for violating its policies. That\u2019s done through a combination of machine learning and human moderation \u2013 and we learned for the first time that 363 content moderators are employed by TikTok in the UK alone, out of 800 total employees. One MP may have inadvertently admitted to looking at Steve Brine, MP for Winchester, had an interesting line of questioning for Bertram. \u201cFlicking through the TikTok feed this morning before the session, you know, it\u2019s what my mother would have called \u2018trashy\u2019,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s lots of content where mother and daughter\u2026 pushing their tushy, if you know what I mean. There\u2019s lots of sexualised content in a clever way. There\u2019s people jumping off piers into the water. Are we not better than that as a society?\u201d Bertram didn\u2019t point out that the videos served on TikTok\u2019s For You page are determined by a user\u2019s past engagement with similar videos. MPs don\u2019t know the difference between MAC addresses and Mac computers \u201cTikTok has been accused of accessing information on people\u2019s Apple Macs, on their iPads, on their iPhones,\u201d began one question from another MP, 62-year-old Clive Efford. Read More: How to get the anime filter on TikTok – \u201cI think the thing you\u2019re referring to is the MAC, which is not actually the Apple Mac,\u201d Bertram kindly corrected in response. \u201cMAC is a feature that allows you to identify the device.\u201d Bertram doesn\u2019t always like the laws TikTok has to follow Much of the MPs\u2019 questioning focused on whether Bertram approved of China\u2019s state policies towards Uyghur Muslims, who are oppressed and brutalised by the Chinese state, or its censorship of student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The questions were designed to identify the issue with TikTok\u2019s Chinese roots. But more interestingly, Bertram also admitted that the requirement to follow laws elsewhere gives him pause. Asked by John Nicholson MP about whether he was happy TikTok acceded to requests to take down LGBTQ+ content in Russia, Bertram said he agreed. \u201c The Russian law is terrible,\u201d he said. \u201cI think our communities does, too, and they strongly voice that on the platform. But we unfortunately have to comply with legal requests in the countries we operate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Five things we learned from TikTok\u2019s first ever grilling by politicians PixabayDespite repeatedly declining to testify in front of Congress \u2013 which may partly have contributed to the situation that has seen TikTok forced to give away 20% of its company to Oracle and Walmart in the oddest business deal of the year \u2013 TikTok […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}