TikTok: Stop Pushing White Supremacy
Shou Zi Chew, CEO TikTok and CFO, ByteDance
TikTok, the most popular social media platform with kids and teens, is also full of hate speech and extremism, including white supremacy, terrorism, and hundreds of other examples of harmful, inappropriate videos. Some examples the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found in their new report include:
Hundreds of videos that promote white supremacy and Holocaust denial.
Hundreds of videos expressing support for terrorists and actual terrorist footage, like of the 2019 Christchurch shooting and various ISIS attacks.
30 videos from white supremacist Paul Miller, in which he berated, racially abused or targeted women, Jewish people or Black people.
More than 50 videos that promoted hatred against women and featured wider misogynistic content, including content that praised mass murderers.
Dozens of videos that used COVID-19 conspiracies to attack, threaten or stigmatize a person or group, including numerous videos that called for Dr Fauci to be executed.
Hate-mongers use TikTok’s tools to promote their violent messages, including using hate references in their usernames and profile images, and leveraging TikTok’s systems to increase visibility and evade takedowns.
TikTok must act now to improve and enforce policies on extremist threats, provide more algorithm transparency, and give researchers data access to study and interrupt extremism.
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To:
Shou Zi Chew, CEO TikTok and CFO, ByteDance
From:
[Your Name]
Dear Mr. Chew,
Hate, discrimination, and white supremacy are destroying our societies and TikTok is playing a role. TikTok shows children violent, extremist hate speech, which directly harms kids from marginalized backgrounds and recruits other children into dangerous ideologies. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue reviewed over 1000 hate speech videos on TikTok and found disturbing amounts of white supremacist, terrorist, violent, and misogynist content. As TikTok is the most popular platform for kids and has millions of underage users, you have a responsibility to keep them safe from these harms and to stop contributing to a world of greater injustice. We are asking you to immediately:
- Tighten policies to capture extremism threats and better enforce existing policies around content depicting and promoting terrorism and hate speech.
- Provide greater transparency around how TikTok features' algorithmically amplify hateful and extremist content, and educate parents and kids on potential harms and risks.
- Give researchers access to data with an API that empowers researchers to better understand — and ultimately help to counter — hate and extremism on TikTok.
- These are critical changes to help stop the spread of hate on TikTok and keep your young and vulnerable users safe.