TikTok Malaysia says political advertisements are banned amid claims of biased platform moderator

KUALA LUMPUR: TikTok Malaysia clarified on Wednesday (Mar 1) that political advertisements are banned on the popular video-sharing platform.

In a statement, TikTok Malaysia’s head of public policy Hafizin Tajudin said: “At TikTok, we aim to provide community members with a diverse range of relevant and entertaining content. 

“To achieve this, we do promote a small fraction of videos to help diversify the content experience and introduce celebrities and emerging creators to the TikTok community.

“However, we do not allow political ads on the platform, which is further strengthened through the changes in the policies for government, politician and political party accounts (GPPPA) that was made last year.”

He reiterated that TikTok does not allow paid advertisements that “promote or oppose a candidate, government, current leader, political party or group, or issue at the federal, state, or local level”.

The statement was issued after a viral video claimed that a Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) member was also part of the TikTok moderation team. The video noted that moderators could determine what content would go viral.

Malaysian Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil reportedly said at the sidelines of an event on Tuesday that he has been in touch with TikTok regarding the allegations in the video.  

He noted that people have made assumptions that “the 4,000 TikTok moderators are biased towards one political party”.

“I’ve been in touch with TikTok as these are serious allegations and if true, this means some people have managed to infiltrate the company.

“We’ll need to do some due diligence and also we don’t want people to think they’ve been oppressed and spreading this misinformation is wrong too,” he was quoted as saying by MalayMail.

Opposition Perikatan Nasional (PN) coalition’s strong showing in the 15th general election when they won 74 seats has been attributed to its astute TikTok campaign strategy. PAS is a component party of PN.  

Mr Hafizin of TikTok said that while the former employee mentioned in the video served as a content moderator, such moderators do not have any authority or access to any forms of promotional tools for content.

“We have a robust quality assurance system in place to ensure that the political or personal opinions of our employees do not affect their work quality and ethics, including when performing content moderation tasks.

“TikTok’s content moderation decisions are based on a set of clearly defined Community Guidelines and have layers of checks and balances including quality assurance and third-party fact checkers, to uphold safety and ensure fairness in moderation,” he said.

On Tuesday, it was reported that the European Parliament banned TikTok from being installed on staff phones, amid unease over how the app owned by Chinese firm ByteDance was harvesting user data.

Following the ban, Mr Fahmi, the minister, was quoted as saying by Malay Mail that Cybersecurity Malaysia has been asked to investigate the matter.

“They’ve been tasked with checking the allegations made by the EU as well as what they were suspicious of. If there is any matter that arises that we need to consider since this involves personal and sensitive data, we will take the necessary steps,” he added.

The US Senate as well as the Canadian government have also banned TikTok from being installed on government-issued devices.