TikTok shown to be reliant on biased anti-Israel sources - N12

Anti-Israel biased sources are reportedly propped up by TikTok, with videos citing sources such as Al Jazeera being platformed further on the app, according to a Sunday exclusive by N12.

Videos boosted by the platform included those saying Zionism is Nazism and that Hamas is not a terrorist organization.

Since October 7, Israelis and most Jews in the diaspora on TikTok have felt that the social media platform is biased against them. The N12 report revealed what goes on inside one of the most important departments at TikTok - the one that determines which content will be blocked from being distributed to users and which videos will resonate with hundreds of millions of people.

"TikTok has a team whose role is called packet checking. It's a team that is supposed to handle everything that is considered a claim or establishing a fact that is uploaded to TikTok, and it is difficult to make a decision about it," N12 quoted an Israeli who works in TikTok's training department and spoke to Israeli media for the first time.

The employee signed a strict confidentiality agreement and took on a great risk from the conversation. However, according to her, she can no longer remain indifferent to what she saw in the company, N12 reported.

"Those fact-checking teams rely on controversial sources such as Al Jazeera, the Amnesty Organization, and just personal opinions. We encountered these things during our practices and trainings," she continued. "Since the events of October 7, the department in charge of the problematic content on the platform has been making delusional decisions. At first, I thought it was simply pro-Palestinian workers doing whatever they wanted, but then I discovered that it was a real policy."

An example that the employer collected from her work includes a video uploaded on TikTok in December that claimed that the number of dead in Gaza was 17 thousand and that 45% of them were children - a number that Israel denied.

Users reported to TikTok that this was false information and asked to remove the video. TikTok decided that it was not wrong information and stated that their reasoning was based on data from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and Al Jazeera.

"TikTok was hijacked by an internal team called Trust and Safety, which has many Hamas supporters, terror supporters, and those with extremist views," N12 quoted Barak Hershkowitz, an information awareness expert and a liaison between the app and the Israeli government.

"These people are supposed to be the most fair, not politically biased, and the most transparent. And 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."

Another video TikTok's content reviewers approved claimed that Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Users complained to the company that it was wrong information, but the department's employees determined it was not. The reasoning? "Some countries define Hamas as a terrorist organization, and some do not. The claim is an opinion."

TikTok decides: Hamas is not a terrorist organization

Another video that TikTok's content reviewers approved claimed that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, N12 reported. Users complained to the company that Hamas is a terrorist group, but the department's employees determined that it was not wrong information. They reason that "Some countries define Hamas as a terrorist organization, and some do not. The claim is an opinion."

However, TikTok's fact-checkers, when users asked them to reject a video that Zionism is the same as Nazism, decided not to, the report said. "The final product, for the users who experience TikTok, is completely biased and fundamentally anti-Israeli," said the Israeli employee of the company.

Another video uploaded to TikTok promoted a lie that Israelis were the ones who raped and burned people on October 7 and not Hamas. Still, the platform determined that the information was debatable and decided not to remove it and allow it to reach viewers.

Another case is related to the Israeli campaign that promoted the message "Hamas is ISIS," which became a popular hashtag on social media among Israelis at the beginning of the war and was also used on TikTok. The tag "Hamas is ISIS" was meant to illustrate the evil and cruelty of Hamas - but TikTok decided that it was a tagging that constitutes disinformation. The reasoning provided by the organization, according to N12 was that "Hamas is a different organization than ISIS."

"We shared this information with the supervisors or the people responsible for spreading it, but the company prefers to ignore it," adds the Israeli. "TikTok Israel has excellent employees who try to fight against the bias," said Hershkowitz. "They ultimately do what they can, but the problem is much bigger and systemic and comes from the company's offices abroad.

Since the outbreak of the war, TikTok has claimed that its platform is equal and safe for everyone and that its algorithm does not promote content from one side over the other. N12 reported that the company claimed that the reason for the disparity between the views of pro-Palestinian content compared to the Israeli content stems from the fact that there are more Muslims on the platform. They also claimed to remove content that promotes terrorism, hatred, and antisemitism.

The N12 report claimed that the examples they presented present a different picture than what the social media platform claims - one of a systematic policy to support one side over another, even if this meant spreading lies about Israel and taking a clear position.

TikTok: We are working to keep the platform safe

TikTok responded, "We are constantly working to keep the platform pleasant and safe for all members of the community. Our policy is clear - content that promotes terrorism, hatred, antisemitism, and false information is prohibited, including content that promotes Hamas. Our fact-checking is carried out through external experts in accordance with international standards. We enforce and monitor content using a combination of technologies and a team of 40,000 human content reviewers. 98% of content found to violate community rules is removed before it's even reported.

"Since the outbreak of the war, we have removed millions of videos and suspended hundreds of thousands of live broadcasts in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank due to the violation of our community guidelines, and we are working to further strengthen the protection mechanisms for our users to remain a safe space for self-expression and authenticity.

"The videos in question are mostly from the months of October, November, and December of last year. In order to be able to check the claims that were brought to us, we asked to be provided with recent examples of the described cases - but unfortunately, these were not provided to us, which raises the question of how significant the phenomenon in question is. We recognize that there is always room for improvement, cooperation, and dialogue."