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TikTok says a video of a man apparently dying by suicide that circulated on its platform was unfold intentionally by a group of customers working collectively.
The firm discovered proof of a “coordinated assault” when it investigated why the video was suddenly appearing on the popular short-video sharing app, a TikTok executive told a British parliamentary committee Tuesday.
TikTok scrambled earlier this month to remove clips of the man dying by suicide, raising concerns about the platform’s ability to stop harmful content from reaching its users, many of whom are teens.
Theo Bertram, TikTok’s European director of public policy, said there was a huge spike in the number of clips uploaded to TikTok about a week after the original video was livestreamed on Facebook.
“There’s evidence of a coordinated attack,” Bertrand said. “Through our investigations, we learned that groups operating on the dark web made plans to raid social media platforms including TikTok, in order to spread the video across the Internet. What we saw was a group of users who were repeatedly attempting to upload the video to our platform.” The dark web is a part of the internet accessible only through anonymity-providing software.
The users were “splicing it, editing it and cutting it in different ways” after which making new accounts to assist unfold it, he stated.
TikTok customers normally look via their very own feed or use hashtags to seek out movies. But these customers have been clicking on account profiles, apparently anticipating that they might be posting the suicide clip, which is an uncommon approach to discover movies, Bertram stated. He gave few different particulars.
The firm wrote Monday to 9 different tech platforms proposing that they warn one another about violent and graphic content material on their very own companies.
Bertram’s feedback got here as TikTok stated in its newest transparency report that it took down 104.5 million movies for violating its pointers or phrases of service throughout the first six months of the yr. That’s lower than one % of the entire quantity of movies uploaded for that interval.
TikTok’s Chinese proprietor, ByteDance, is combating strain in some of its main markets. In the US, TikTok faces a ban later this month from smartphone app shops, adopted by a broader ban in November until ByteDance can persuade US officers it will possibly resolve nationwide safety issues.
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