TIKTOK Malaysia has assured that it will not adhere to orders from the unity government regarding its operations.
Thus far, the government has not interfered with the operations of the short-form video hosting service provider, according to its public policy director Hafizin Tajudin.
“We will not take instructions from the government. We are first and foremost guided by our community guidelines and have a strict policy against that,” Malaysiakini reported him as saying at a panel session entitled “Tackling Hate Speech Online: What do we need to do legally, socially, and politically” yesterday (March 21).
“Our guidelines are a global standard, meaning we are subjected to robust quality assurances. For example, if we didn’t comply with these standards, the global (TikTok) team will be able to detect and investigate it.”
Hafizin further stated that engagements done with the Communications and Digital Ministry and its Minister Fahmi Fadzil have been in TikTok’s capacity as a stakeholder in the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC).
He claimed that countering misinformation and disinformation is an area in which TikTok has collaborated with the government.
This follows an uptick in provocative content on TikTok in the aftermath of the 15th General Election (GE15) which was not taken down.
“Eventually, post-GE15 saw a power vacuum which led to the spread of May 13 content on the platform,” commented Fahmi.
“Was it an oversight on our end, I will say that it was not as by the time we had received Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission’s (MCMC) request to take down the content, we had already taken down close to 2,000 pieces detected for various breaches by our AI (artificial intelligence).”
Moreover, Hafizin argued that with only 5% leakage rate of provocative content, TikTok would have been able to remove 95% of it.
TikTok automatically removed 857 videos between Nov 12 and 18 while 1,126 videos were removed between Nov 20 and 26.
Furthermore, Fahmi claimed that in addition to the videos that TikTok’s AI-based technology removed automatically, the MCMC also submitted 202 requests for the removal of content to the firm between Dec 5, 2022 and Jan 1 this year. — March 22, 2023
