TikTok moderators were asked not to remove content containing 'disturbing' attacks against Palestinian people despite the app's guidelines banning 'violence or suffering', a former employee has told Hack.
In one of the only public interviews with a TikTok worker on record, the former moderator has given Hack a unique and exclusive insight into the company's notoriously secret processes around deciding what ends up in a user's feed. It is her personal account of what went on at the company.
She said TikTok's own company guidelines, which say the app "takes a firm stance against enabling violence" and does not moderate content because of political sensitivities, were inconsistently applied when dealing with content about Palestinian people.
It adds to growing accusations that the app is using its powerful algorithm to silence political movements.
TikTok is the fastest growing social media network ever, and was the most downloaded app of 2020. But the former worker has told Hack there's more to this app than its fun and bright facade.
TikTok's 'Israel Team'
In 2020, Gadear Ayed - who is an Iraqi person living in the UK - was looking for work through a jobs agency in London. Unlike one billion people around the world, Gadear didn't even have TikTok on her phone.
"It wasn't something that I had even downloaded myself, when I did apply for the job, I didn't even know that the job was at TikTok to be honest because I applied through an agency".
The Chinese-owned app provides users with an endless stream of algorithmically curated short videos. The company has previously said more than 10,000 people work in moderation and they're based around the world, scrutinising content from different countries for safety and legal issues.
Gadear began a role as a TikTok content moderator in the Arabic language team, based in London, in December 2020.
A few months earlier, TikTok moved its moderation teams from China and made them 'region-oriented', meaning staff assess content from particular areas, with their own policies, and in the relevant languages.
The move came after ongoing concerns about the Chinese Communist Party's control over TikTok.
Gadear said her team of around 50 staff was moderating content from the Israel and the Palestinian territories and was a combination of Arabic and Hebrew speakers. She said they were known in the company as the 'Israel Team'.
"When I first started, there were a lot of music videos, there were fashion videos... and there were a lot of videos regarding the Palestine and Israel situation," she told Hack.
Gadear said the moderation process happened in two stages.
"In the first stage, videos are moderated by an independent group so it's not moderated by TikTok moderators because sometimes there are really sensitive videos such as violence or sexual videos that we can't be exposed to," she said.
"The second stage is where we come in, where we watch 1000 videos daily."
Moderators would then tag the videos which would dictate whether they'd be removed.
Gadear said although videos are supposed to be filtered through external moderators before reaching TikTok staff, that's not always the case.
"There were some instances where we did get very sensitive videos. For example, I saw a video where a child, who is around the age of five, accidentally hangs himself."
The dark side of TikTok's algorithmModeration of Palestinian content
Five months into Gadear's job at TikTok in April 2021, violence escalated in the region, the worst since 2014.
One difference during this violence was the use of TikTok as a key battleground to control the public narrative.
At that time, a video reportedly of Arab teenagers in East Jerusalem slapping two Orthodox Jewish boys on public transport went viral on the app.
Israeli police arrested more than 50 young Palestinians alleging they shared the video and two teenagers accused of being involved in the incident. Israeli security services said the TikTok video created motivation for more violence between Jewish extremist groups and Palestinian people, but the extent to which the app played a role in what occurred is unclear.
Conflict also occurred in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, where an Israeli court was considering forcibly removing Palestinians from their homes. The weeks of violence which followed led to multiple injuries and deaths. Israel carried out hundreds of air strikes in Gaza and Palestinian Hamas militants fired multiple rocket barrages at Tel Aviv and the southern city of Beersheba.
Gadear's team had to moderate TikTok videos about the conflict for safety, based on policies created by senior staff within the 'Israel team'.
"We have to learn the whole book of TikTok's policies and then once we are introduced to our teams, the policies can differ based on which region we are moderating," she said.
"So for example, the policies in Europe would be different from those in the Middle East."
She said seniors in her regional team gave moderators a list of banned organisations and if they came up in a TikTok, that video would have to be removed and tagged as 'terrorism'.
"Several Palestinian resistence groups were on that list including Hamas and Israeli opposition groups... they all had to be removed," she said.
"Accounts were being blocked, videos were being removed, just in order to act like there was nothing going on and silence the Palestinian voice."
Hamas has been listed as a terror group by some governments including the US, Canada, and the EU while countries like Australia and New Zealand have only designated its military wing in that category.
Some TikToks, like a video showing crying Palestinian children as well as the destruction of a building and people fleeing Israeli strikes in Gaza, racked up millions of views.
Some commentators said the app became a place for Palestinians to tell their side of the story. Others have warned it was used to incite the violence.
But several influencers on TikTok have posted about their videos being taken down and accounts being banned when they post in favour of Palestinians. Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian US Congresswoman, also called on TikTok, along with other social media sites, to stop censoring Palestinian political speech.
She said her inbox was "filled with reports" of takedowns of people's accounts.
Australian TikTok creator Paniora Nuknuku was just one of many who told Hack and Four Corners in July about censorship of pro-Palestinian videos.
"I was furious. I was like, why? There is nothing in these videos that will justify a removal, there really isn't," Paniora said at the time.
QUT researcher Dr Bondy Kaye said Gadear's accusations add to growing number of complaints against TikTok for using its algorithm to censor and suppress political speech.
"It feeds into the narrative and to some of the conspiracy theories that TikTok has an agenda, and you see this a lot, particularly around Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, queer creator communities who feel as though they are not receiving support, or they're being intentionally suppressed or shadow banned by the platform," Dr Kaye told Hack.
"But it's difficult to find concrete evidence to support some of these claims, however, when you hear from actual moderators working for TikTok themselves, that they're being told to suppress certain types of posts, it lends a lot of credence to these concerns."
Last year, TikTok apologised for suppressing posts with the hashtag "Black Lives Matter" and "George Floyd" after thousands of creators took to the platform to protest about their videos being suppressed or accounts being banned.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) conducted the first academic investigation into censorship on TikTok and found hashtags about the mass detention of Uyghurs, Hong Kong protests, LGBTQI and anti-Russian government videos were among those being suppressed.
Hack has put all of these concerns to TikTok but the company did not answer questions about how Palestinian and Israeli content was moderated.
"Our Community Guidelines apply equally to everyone and all content on our platform, and nothing in our moderation practices seeks to discriminate against any creator or community on our platform," a TikTok spokeswoman told Hack.
"We also allow people to submit an appeal directly in our app if they believe their content or account was incorrectly removed."
Violent and extremist content
Along with censorship accusations, TikTok has failed to deal appropriately with harmful and violent content on its platform.
Gadear said TikToks showing brutal violence against Palestinians were allowed to stay up on the platform while the same situation involving Israeli people were taken down.
She said the team's leaders were supposed to create policies on how to moderate major news events but that only occurred for incidents involving Israeli people.
"When the Sheikh Jarrah incident happened... that's when my concern grew large," Gadear said.
"During that period, 90% of the videos that we were viewing were violence against Palestinians... there were women and children being dragged across the street but they said that we can't remove these videos because there's not enough brutality.
"And I just found that bizarre, to be honest, because how much more brutality do you need in order to remove a video from the platform? So it was almost as if, like, it didn't matter to them."
"There were so many forms of violence and it was really disturbing for us to watch."
Videos in favour of Israel were also going viral on TikTok - one allegedly showing an Israeli soldier shielding a Palestinian woman from rocks thrown by Palestinian protesters was viewed more than 1.5 million times on the app and wasn't taken down for several weeks.
"We do not allow content that is gratuitously shocking, graphic, sadistic, or gruesome or that promotes, normalizes, or glorifies extreme violence or suffering on our platform," TikTok's community guidelines say.
"When there is a threat to public safety, we suspend or ban the account and, when warranted, we will report it to relevant legal authorities."
TikTok has said it removed more than 89 million videos globally for violating the platform's guidelines, and more than 8 per cent of them contained violent or graphic content.
Who's in charge?
Gadear said her regional team and bosses were predominantly Israelis, even though they were also moderating TikTok videos from the Palestinian Territories.
"The advisors, the policy advisors, the policymakers were Israelis and most of the management were Israelis," she said.
"And none of the Arabs progressed to any senior positions at the company in that group."
Dr Bondy Kaye said this could all show TikTok has been facing political pressure "to suppress content critical of the State of Israel".
"It's also a very dangerous image for the company to represent, simply by perpetuating some of these kinds of harmful and dangerous ideologies and norms, turning the way we talk about this conflict," he said.
TikTok did not answer Hack's questions about the team's superiors and who created the internal moderation policies.
In May, Israel's Defence Minister Benny Gantz asked Facebook and TikTok to remove posts which he said could incite violence against the country.
"Our teams have been working swiftly to remove misinformation, attempts to incite violence, and other content that violates our Community Guidelines, and will continue to do so," a TikTok spokesman said at the time.
"Not just a fun app"
Gadear said watching a thousand, often gruesome and violent videos every day, affected her mental health and she received little company support.
"It didn't only affect my mental health, it affected the mental health of all my colleagues from the Arabic speakers," Gadear said.
In mid 2021, Gadear quit her job as a TikTok moderator after deciding to call out some of the practices to her team's management. She's been unemployed for more than five months and said she'd prefer that to working at TikTok.
"As someone working on such a huge platform like TikTok you feel like maybe you can make a difference to the outside world but you don't have that ability," she said.
"And then you realise that, actually, it's not just that fun app where you watch videos, it's so much deeper than that, it goes into politics, it goes into a lot of detailed topics.
"They're not dealing with it appropriately, they're biased, there is a lot of discrimination, and a lot of point of views, nothing is neutral."
Editor’s Note (21/12/21): This article has been edited to remove reference to a report from 7amleh, which advocates for Arab rights online, that found at least 500 reports of Palestinian political speech were taken down from social media. However, only one per cent of the reports taken down related to TikTok.