‘We Know Just Saying ‘Trust Us’ Is Not Enough’: TikTok Promises Transparency to Researchers
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
TikTok on Wednesday pledged to give “selected researchers” more transparency into the video-sharing platform and its content moderation systems, a decision that comes amid fresh concerns that the Chinese-owned app could pose national security risks.
The Culver City-based company is developing a tool for researchers to more easily access public and anonymized data about content and activity on the platform, TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas wrote in a company blog post. In addition, TikTok plans to allow certain researchers to examine its content moderation systems, letting them upload their own content to see how videos are either permitted, rejected or passed to moderators for further evaluation.
The social media giant also promised to give independent experts of the company’s U.S. Content Advisory Council access to confidential information, such as keyword lists used to detect and flag potentially violating content. Finally, the company said it will publish insights on covert influence operations it finds and remove from its platform on a quarterly basis.
“We work to earn and maintain trust through ongoing transparency into the actions we take to safeguard our platform, because we know that just saying ‘trust us’ is not enough,” Pappas wrote.
TikTok’s transparency pledge came just hours after another series of damaging news reports about the company’s ties to China. BuzzFeed News reported Tuesday that TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, pushed pro-China messages to Americans using a now defunct news app called TopBuzz (ByteDance forcefully denied the claims). On Wednesday, a Gizmodo story detailed the ways TikTok tries to publicly downplay its Chinese ownership.
Still, TikTok’s China problem might not be the only reason for the new transparency push. The company is also facing criticism over how the app can harm teens and younger users. What’s more, European lawmakers recently passed a law requiring TikTok and others to share more data with researchers.
“Some of the regulation passed in Europe in the Digital Services Act is forcing platforms to set-up more of these programs,” Brandon Silverman, the co-founder and former CEO of social monitoring platform CrowdTangle, told dot.LA by email. He said TikTok’s decision is a “promising sign” and part of a broader industry-wide trend toward sharing data with the outside world.
Still, “the devil will be in the details and we should wait to see what the programs actually look like before passing too much judgment,” added Silverman, whose CrowdTangle was bought by Meta (then named Facebook) in 2016 before he left last year. Among other things, Silverman said he’s curious whether TikTok will make it easy to monitor the most important public content in real-time, and whether it will limit data availability to university-affiliated researchers.
“But for everyone who cares about real transparency, it's an important step in the right direction but we still have a long way to go,” he said.
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Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
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