A TikTok employee said ‘fact checking’ divisions relied on Al Jazeera, Amnesty organizations, and personal opinions.
By Shula Rosen
TikTok consistently boosts anti-Israel content on its social media platform and it “fact checks” posts using Al Jazeera and other biased sources, N12 reports.
Since October 7th, Jewish TikTok employees said they experienced harassment, and users who posted on behalf of the hostages found their posts had been taken down.
More recently, a TikTok employee told N12 that the inner circle of TikTok that decides which posts to boost is intentionally skewing the platform to show bias in favor of anti-Israel content.
Examples of the kind of posts that are boosted are those that equate Zionism with Nazism and spread conspiracy theories about Israel and October 7th.
The anonymous employee reported that “TikTok has a team whose role is called ‘packet checking.’ It’s a team that is supposed to handle everything considered a claim or establish a fact uploaded to TikTok.”
The Israeli employee said she signed a confidentiality agreement, but the situation had become so severe that she decided to report it to the Israeli press.
She said that “fact-checking” divisions relied on Al Jazeera, Amnesty organizations, and personal opinions.
At first, she said she blamed it on Palestinian staff doing as they wished until she discovered it was official policy at TikTok.
The employee discussed how TikTok was allowing users to make false claims, including that 45% of those killed in Gaza were children.
Barak Hershkowitz, an information awareness expert, said, “TikTok was hijacked by an internal team called Trust and Safety, which has many Hamas supporters, terror supporters, and those with extremist views.”
He added, “In the end, with their small decisions, they bias the platform and its coverage and present a false representation that is shown to young Europeans and Americans.”
For instance, TikTok decided that Hamas is not a terrorist organization based on the fact that some countries do not consider it a terror organization.
TikTok stated, “Some countries define Hamas as a terrorist organization, and some do not. The claim is an opinion.”
However, TikTok allowed the sentiment that Zionism is Nazism to stand unchallenged.
Also, a post that accused Israelis, not Hamas, of mass rape on October 7th was considered “debatable” by TikTok and was allowed to remain on the platform.