TikTok is laying off hundreds of employees worldwide, with some particularly deep cuts to its content moderation team. According to Reuters, TikTok will be focusing on AI-powered content moderation instead.
Social media content moderation is not a job for the faint of heart. Back in 2021, a former Facebook content moderator spoke with NBC News about the horrors content moderators are subjected to every day. It sounds like an endless barrage of psychological torture since it’s their job to filter out some of the most traumatic, scarring content users post.
Moderation is also a vitally important part of maintaining a social media platform’s ecosystem. For an example of how poor content moderation can create a social media hellscape, look no further than Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, which has devolved into a carnival of horrors. But there are plenty of questions about whether an AI content moderator can do a better job of cleaning things up than a human being, despite the psychological toll of the job.
This is all happening as a part of a broader tech industry trend of integrating AI to enhance operational efficiency—which can just be an excuse to save money by cutting jobs that they were already saving on by outsourcing them to countries like Malaysia in the first place. Just a couple of years ago, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that TikTok’s global army of flesh-and-blood mods were only paid the equivalent of around $10 a day for having to watch “murder, suicide, pedophili[a], pornographic content, accidents, [or] cannibalism” with little in the way of mental health care to allow them to mentally handle the barrage of misery they were subjected to every day.
Now, as it turns out, TikTok employees in Malaysia will be hit especially hard. Around 500 Malaysian employees were notified of their termination last week.
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The post TikTok Laying Off Hundreds of Content Moderators, Replacing Them With AI appeared first on VICE.
