PETALING JAYA: TikTok Malaysia has denied claims that a former employee, who served as a content moderator, promoted certain political parties on TikTok.
According to a statement from its public policy head Hafizin Tajudin, following a revised policy last year, all political advertisements have been banned from the social media platform.
Below is the statement in full:
TikTok strongly denies the claims made in a video and a resulting comment made on social media that has since been reshared.
At TikTok, we aim to provide community members with a diverse range of relevant and entertaining content. To achieve this, we do promote a small fraction of videos to help diversify the content experience and introduce celebrities and emerging creators to the TikTok community. However, we do not allow political ads on the platform, which is further strengthened through the changes in the policies for government, politician and political party accounts (GPPPA) that was made last year. To that end, we do not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, government, current leader, political party or group, or issue at the federal, state, or local level.
Regarding the former employee who served as a content moderator, we want to clarify that our moderators do not have any authority or access to any forms of promotional tools for content. We have a robust quality assurance system in place to ensure that the political or personal opinions of our employees do not affect their work quality and ethics, including when performing content moderation tasks. TikTok's content moderation decisions are based on a set of clearly defined Community Guidelines and has layers of checks and balances including quality assurance and third-party fact checkers, to uphold safety and ensure fairness in moderation.
Lastly, TikTok addresses content and behaviour that violates our Community Guidelines through a combination of policies, technology and moderation. As such, we moderate all content, including political expression, neutrally based on our community guidelines and will take actions to remove or make them ineligible for the 'For You' feed if they are found to be in violation of our community guidelines. We remain committed to our mission of providing a safe and positive experience for our community members to connect and share their creativity.
