The actions as described in the press release seem to me both plausible and reasonable. Banning multiaccounts for severe infractions makes sense, and it also makes sense that this account could have been caught up in that.
As for the video takedown... you may underestimate the consistency of human moderators. They are often under intense time pressures and mistakes are made all the time. There is also the potential for individual moderators to apply their own bias to the report outside of company policy. With a 50 mins reversal of the takedown, that seems plausible.
If they are not outright lying, it does seem like the title is accurate and not at all misleading. It does sound like a moderation mishap.
It's always warranted. It's Public Relations, not Public Information, and it's created exactly to convey the best public image that they can muster given the circumstances. Official statements like it should always be regarded with suspicion, because there is little incentive to explain the situation fairly when not doing so is likely to convey a better public image.
It's funny, because if we called it "propaganda" (which PR essentially is) and all agreed that it is, no one would accuse you of being cynical for not trusting it at face value.
And how that does excuse them? If company cannot handle quality moderation with current workforce they should invest in either more qualified people, more people or tooling.
User, and customer to generalize, should not care about that - to them company/service is a black box that provides desired output for their input(content, money, personal information etc).
Whatever goes inside box is of no relevance.
I can get empathizing with employees - in fact everyone should do that, but empathizing with a company? Hell no.
This kind of complaints are missing the point. Youtube allowed predatory copyright claims without any kind of burden of proof on the claimant (only recently they punished a copyright troll). If this was indeed a mistake of human moderation AND the platform is not plagued with them, then I don't understand what you are expecting of them; having so many moderators to have 0% error rate?
I have no insider knowledge, but for example last week a big Youtube channel had many of its followers banned because they were spamming (solicited) emojis in chat.
Somewhere deep in the moderation stack that tripped an edge case of spamming/abuse/who-knows-what (not youtube apparently, they had no idea how this happened
That sounds like a reasonable expectation, yes.
If a company doesn't achieve it or is not even making incremental progress towards it, then it should come under fire.
If you allow me a strawman, the only possible outcome of this is to only expect perfection from everyone, thus building a society based on hiding forever any and all your mistakes.
A satirical twitter account impersonating Satan once twitted "one sin or a thousand sin and you and in hell anyway. Why not go for a billion and come down like a hero?"
I am not saying your opinion is wrong, but it absolutely needs a concept of redemption for balance
But perhaps they should pay a small fine for each account erroneously censored, so that they have a clear incentive to get better. (Who would levy that fine, in the context of multinational corporations, is a separate debate.)
As a practical example public train service in Germany was privatized some decades ago; obviously to guarantee quality the contract stipulate some quotas that need to be reached, one of these is that delays needs to be below a certain level; here comes a captcha, if a train is cancelled it does not count as a delay.
So the financial incentives are essentially to have little (but non zero) delays and cancel all trains with a above average delay.
You cannot game the system and expect the system is not going to game you.
Or better, are you going to be prepared for the consequence of a policy like the one you propose in practice?
Tiktok AFAICR doesn't have the poor systems that say various Google products do for example. I'm not aware of a pattern of behavior on their front, just suspicion.
I am on the fence on this one.
The first ban was over satire. Tiktok recognizes not being open to satire, which is refreshingly straightforward in a way, yet still giving me pause for a social media. Especialy when it’s not the co tent just taken down but the whole account banned.
The “multi-account” part then comes from the girl using the same phone to create a second account after the first one got banned. It’s not an elaborate scheme to game the system and auto praise her videos, or an account farm or that kind of behavior. She would have had a single account if the first one was still alive.
All in all they make it seem like she did a lot of very unrully things when for most other platforms it would have been totally OK behavior.
In particular spending that much time to make her look controversial for satire and humanist speach is unwarranted.
It’s ironic because TikTok was getting a lot of flak in the news recently because they were too slow to remove actual terrorist propaganda. So they probably went overboard and it resulted in this situation.
Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.
> We share your device ID with measurement companies so that we can link your activity on the Platform with your activity on other websites;
My contact at google said a year ago when I asked if they know about Alibaba's device ID abuse for advertising targeting, it's their policy to not to touch Chinese companies' device ID abuse.
Do you mean she actually experienced 1 month of blockage, or that they planned to block her for a month but actually didn't.
The article says she was only blocked for 2-3 days (Nov 25 until now).
seriously, why?
If you know they are subject to that kind of pressure, would you launch your "We stand with the Uighurs" campaign there? Maybe yes, maybe no, but you should consider that carefully. Or maybe you wouldn't want them to gather data on you at all, if you are, say, involved with the Hong Kong resistance or whatever. And maybe, knowing this, you would want to take your data and attention elsewhere just on principle.
Given what we know today, would you trust Facebook to not do any secret shady business with your data? Wouldn't you make that part of a decision where one outcome might give them a lot more data on you?
That's why such info is very much of relevance to customers. That's why they try so hard to control the spin on things like that, because it's harmful if their background gets too much attention.
I do not trust any corporation.. well i do trust them - that they'll do everything they can to profit the most. That includes facebook, as i find no purpose to using social media.
Compare with, say, this pathetic excuse of a non-apology apology from Stack Overflow: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to...
The solution is to search for the point where the article actually says what it's about—it has to eventually, or there's no culpa in the mea culpa. I looked through the article and think I found it, so have put that in the title above.
I should have thought of this earlier, since it's one of our standard tactics.
1. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
2. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
The video was offline for 50 minutes: hardly a big deal, or even a moderate deal.
I think there's a lot of people (in the West) who are happy to criticise anything Chinese, for the slightest possible reason.
You have no supporting statements or evidence backing up this claim.
So you think that companies cannot make mistakes?
> TikTok: An update on recent content and account questions
And not something more honest like:
> TikTok: An apology about a content moderation mishap
This is done to imply they did nothing wrong at the first glance, and then concede they did something wrong but will do better later on in the article.
It is also convenient that they first draw attention to the author of the video being associated with:
> (1) Terrorism or terrorist imagery, (2) Child exploitation, (3) Spam or similar malicious content.
And then immediately after concede that the video was removed because they messed up:
> Due to a human moderation error, the viral video from November 23 was removed. [...] it should not have been removed.
If companies want to know why they can't regain trust and aren't given the benefit of the doubt, it's because they cannot be honest in situations like this. PR in the 21st century is about communicating how you have in fact messed up because you are humans, not trying to gloss over it and distract from it like some corporate overlord.