TikTok Lays Off Hundreds of Employees in AI Content Moderation Shift

TikTok, the social media platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is laying off hundreds of employees worldwide as part of a shift toward using artificial intelligence, primarily in content moderation.

According to Reuters, an anonymous source from TikTok confirmed this Friday that nearly 500 employees in Malaysia were affected. The workers were informed this Wednesday via email, and most of them were part of the content moderation operations.

“We’re making these changes as part of our ongoing efforts to further strengthen our global operating model for content moderation,” said a TikTok spokesperson in a statement.

The source also confirmed that more employees across the globe are expected to be affected by the ongoing modernization of operational processes. ByteDance has around 110,00 employees and presence in around 200 cities, as stated on its website.

With the new system, the company is now removing 80% of content that violates guidelines and rules with artificial intelligence and plans to invest $2 billion in trust and safety for the rest of the year globally.

According to The Malaysia Reserve, which first reported the story, TikTok had been using a combination of humans and artificial intelligence to manage its content moderation operations. Tiktok’s AI technology has been learning from workers to moderate content under a supervised learning process. Human feedback helped the AI improve its accuracy, and it seems to have reached high standard levels.

TikTok has been sued this week by 13 states in the United States over child safety violations, and it’s being accused of having an addictive algorithm that makes children stay on the platform for long periods.