TikTok wants to curb harmful content on social media platforms

The video-sharing app TikTok suggested a global partnership of social media platforms for the identification and removal of harmful content.

TikTok’s move comes even as social media platforms continue to be criticized for spreading misinformation and meddling with a user’s data privacy.

The popular app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, currently in the middle of a political battle, said that it has sent letters to nine social media companies for a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on content moderation.

TikTok says that each platform’s content evaluation efforts can be improved through a formal and cooperative procedure. The app didn’t mention the names of the companies it had contacted for the partnership but it had said that a meeting has been arranged between the firms to discuss the situation.

Earlier, the app had said that it had taken down over 104.5 million videos from its platform globally and it had received 10,600 copyright take-down notices for the first half of this year. The company says out of the 1,768 legal requests it received for user data, 16.4 percent or 290 were from the US law enforcement agencies.

Out of the total number of videos TikTok removed, 96.4 percent were removed before they were reported and 90.3 percent were taken down before they received any views. The number of videos that are being removed has been more than double over the past six months which also shows how the total volume of videos has increased.

The company points out that the biggest section of removed videos was on adult nudity and sexual activities, minor safety, illegal activities, suicide and self-harm, violent content, hate speech and dangerous individuals.

After months of uncertainty, ByteDance had recently come to a deal with Walmart and Oracle in the US, avoiding a ban. The US authorities had raised a concern that the Chinese app is storing and passing the personal data of its 100 million American-users to China’s Communist Party government and mandated that the video app should be divested to an American corporation or face a ban.