TikTok Will Provide More Insight into Content Trends and Moderation via New Research Initiative
-
Loading... - Adriana Salazar
- 28 Jul 2022
- 114 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
Under increasing scrutiny from regulators, and amid various lingering questions and concerns about its ownership and its content approach, TikTok is looking to provide more assurance that it’s not censoring certain content, or amplifying certain perspectives, via new API access points which will enable academics and researchers to glean more insight into exactly how its systems work.
Under a new program, TikTok will soon enable researchers to access public and anonymized data about content and activity on the platform. It will also facilitate insights into its content moderation systems, via API access points, with stringent restrictions on who can access the tools.
That could shine some more light on exactly why TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed is so addictive, by enabling researchers to determine what users are engaging with, as well as what its moderation teams look to remove. Though it won’t, however, provide insights into TikTok’s AI systems, and the details that it can extract from each uploaded clip, and how it then uses those data points to decide what to show each user, based on their interests.
Which is really the ‘secret sauce’ of the app, and likely its most controversial element, with TikTok’s advanced algorithms able to pinpoint very specific elements within video clips, which it can then use for content sorting.
For example, back in 2020, a leaked internal document showed that TikTok moderators had been instructed to suppress content that featured people who were ‘too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform’. TikTok has said that such regulations were quickly removed from its guidance, but the very concept that TikTok is even able to do this, based partly on algorithm identification, suggests that its systems are able to use such parameters as ranking tools - which means that TikTok can, and likely does, use physical traits like this to show people more of what the like, and less of what they don’t. Read More...
