TikTok plans to build an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can moderate content, CEO Shou Zi Chew said yesterday (April 20) at TED2023. In addition to using AI, the company now employs “tens of thousands” of workers in Ireland to manage user content, he said.
“Technology will become more precise and specific and will handle greater scale with content moderation,” he said.
Chu performed at TED’s annual event in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He spoke with Chris Anderson, the head of conference organization, for 20 minutes.
Content moderation was a top priority for U.S. lawmakers when Chu testified before Congress last month. Washington Republican Rep. Kathy McMorris Rogers has accused the company of presenting users with harmful content, including content that encourages self-harm, eating disorders and dangerous challenges. At the hearing, Mr. Chu reiterated how the content violated his TikTok guidelines, which didn’t seem to appease lawmakers, but at the TED conference, he said his We revealed how TikTok’s content moderation really works and what the company is doing to improve it.
TikTok’s Irish content moderation team is one of the company’s “most significant cost items,” Chew said in an interview. He didn’t elaborate on how much money the company spends on content moderation, but since it’s a privately held company, it doesn’t have to be disclosed.
Chew’s five-year vision for TikTok includes increasing the number of small businesses that profit from the app and fostering the discovery of new ideas, he said.
How TikTok’s Algorithm Works
At the conference, Shew also explained the basics of TikTok’s algorithm. Anderson pointed out that it’s different than other social media recommendation engines. The technology learns what users are interested in based on what they’ve liked in the past, and finds people who like the same videos or have the same “interest signals,” Chew said. said. The algorithm then recommends to each other what these users individually like. This allows apps to predict what a user is interested in before they know it.
This algorithm is the same as that of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. But TikTok’s rapid growth and high viewership can be attributed to the vision it had when it was founded, Chew said. Other apps built on another, but it was always meant to recommend posts based on what users liked, not who they knew. , started as a company to connect friends online before veering to recommending content based on their interests.
Some critics point out that Instagram falls far short of its purpose. According to the petition entitled “Make Instagram Instagram Again,” users want to see posts from their friends and an algorithm that prioritizes photos over videos, but their feeds are less interesting than those seen on TikTok. Similar to a video based on .
“You can’t shift in the middle,” Chu said. “The community has come along and we expect something different.”
But that’s what Instagram seems to be doing. “The world is changing so fast that we need to evolve and change with it,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to Twitter last year. Told.
