In late August, a video of a man committing suicide was posted on Facebook. The video spread to other platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Youtube, but continued to appear on TikTok for weeks as the app struggled to remove content.
TikTok recently approached the House of Commons to explain how this happened. On Friday, the Australian Select Committee on Foreign Media through social media continued this question by discussing with the local director general and its global security chief application.
According to Lee Hunter, General Manager of TikTok Australia and New Zealand, live-stream removed, but the copies of the video were displayed faster than they could be detected.
"We immediately downloaded the video but unfortunately over the course of a week, we saw 10.000 variations of this video trying to be downloaded to platform of TikTok ", he explained.
How exactly did these videos bypass platform controls? The company said it would prefer not to say, explaining that this would highlight some of the methods adopted to avoid detection. Lee Hunter said, however, that as soon as TikTok was informed of the video, it began to "act quickly and aggressively" to remove it.
Working its systems for better detection of such content, Hunter said platform monitoring teams around the world focused on dealing with what had happened.
"As far as I know, at the moment no copy of the video is displayed on our platform. "It does not mean that we should be reassured," he said.
TikTok contacted their supervisors Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit, proposing that they make a deal that will allow social media security groups to share information to better protect against such content.
As the committee focuses on how social media plays a role in the potential harm to the Republic of Australia, TikTok representatives were also asked if the platform could be "undermined and hacked". In addition, the committee asked representatives how TikTok could be sure he has political influence under control.
"If you can not even protect our children from watching suicide videos, how do you protect Australian voters from political interference?" Asked Sen. Sarah Hanson-Young.
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