Videos boosted by the TikTok platform included those saying Zionism is Nazism and that Hamas is not a terrorist organisation, citing sources such as Al Jazeera.
Since the October 7 massacre by Hamas, Israelis and most Jews in the diaspora on TikTok have felt that the social media platform is biased against them, reports The Jerusalem Post.
N12, a company producing news programs for Israeli Channel 12, prepared a report revealing how TikTok determines whether content will be blocked from being distributed to users or resonate with hundreds of millions of people.
„TikTok has a team whose role is called packet checking. It’s a team that is supposed to handle everything that is considered a claim or establishing a fact that is uploaded to TikTok, and it is difficult to make a decision about it,” N12 quoted an Israeli who works in TikTok’s training department and who spoke to Israeli media for the first time.
„Those fact-checking teams rely on controversial sources such as Al Jazeera, the Amnesty Organisation, and just personal opinions. We encountered these things during our practices and trainings,” she continued. „Since the events of October 7, the department in charge of the problematic content on the platform has been making delusional decisions. At first, I thought it was simply pro-Palestinian workers doing whatever they wanted, but then I discovered that it was a real policy.”
An example is a video uploaded on TikTok in December that claimed that the number of dead in Gaza was 17 thousand and that 45% of them were children – a number that Israel denied. Users reported to TikTok that this was false information and asked to remove the video. TikTok decided it was not wrong information and stated that their reasoning was based on data from the (Hamas-run) Gaza Health Ministry and Al Jazeera.
Another video claimed that Hamas is not a terrorist organisation. When users complained to the company, the department’s employees determined it was not.
Yet another video promoted a lie that Israelis were the ones who raped and burned people on October 7 and not Hamas. Still, the platform determined that the information was debatable and decided not to remove it and allow it to reach viewers.
On the other hand, when the hashtag #HamasIsISIS became popular among Israeli users, serving to illustrate the cruelty of Hamas, TikTok decided that it was a tagging that constitutes disinformation.
According to Barak Hershkowitz, an information awareness expert and a liaison between TikTok and the Israeli government, the app was „hijacked by an internal team called Trust and Safety, which has many Hamas supporters, terror supporters, and those with extremist views. „
Hershkowitz noted that even though TikTok Israel is trying to fight against the bias, „the problem is much bigger and systemic and comes from the company’s offices abroad.”
Since the outbreak of the war, TikTok has claimed that its platform is equal and safe for everyone and that its algorithm does not promote content from one side over the other. They also said that they remove content that promotes terrorism, hatred, and antisemitism, claiming that 98% of content found to violate community rules is removed before it’s even reported. Nevertheless, based on the N12 report, examples present a different picture than what the social media platform claims.
In response, TikTok highlighted that most of the videos mentioned are from October, November, and December last year, suggesting that without new examples, the phenomenon’s significance is questionable.
Photo credit: Ivan Radic
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