In just three months, last year, TikTok removed 80 million uploaded videos that in some way broke its rules.
Now, some are asking whether Big Tech, by removing so much content, is also removing footage of war crimes in Ukraine.TikTok was already hugely popular around the world before Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine - but the war has been a coming-of-age moment for the platform.But Ukrainians uploading videos from the ground could be generating more than "likes".
"TikTok is a platform that celebrates creativity but not shock-value or violence," TikTok's rules say.And some, but not all, content depicting possible atrocities could fall into that category.Researchers are unclear how much Ukrainian user-generated content Tiktok, and other social-media companies such as Meta, Twitter and YouTube are taking down.
This is not the first time big social-media companies have had to deal with evidence of potential war crimes.Human Rights Watch has called for a centralised system of uploads from conflict zones for years, without success.She describes the haphazard and convoluted process prosecutors have to follow to obtain evidence removed from social media.
But many social-media companies do not want to invite outsiders into their moderation processes, leaving researchers with a Rumsfeldian conundrum - they often do not know what has being taken down, so how can they know what to request or subpoena?But not all social-media platforms have the same policies when it comes to graphic content.It also happens to have an extremely light-touch policy on moderation.And that is not the only reason the platform is helping investigators.
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Source: TIME - 🏆 93. / 53 Read more »