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I don’t think this certainty about this being “PR bullshit” is warranted at all, and feels a bit like knee-jerk cynicism.

The actions as described in the press release seem to me both plausible and reasonable. Banning multiaccounts for severe infractions makes sense, and it also makes sense that this account could have been caught up in that.

As for the video takedown... you may underestimate the consistency of human moderators. They are often under intense time pressures and mistakes are made all the time. There is also the potential for individual moderators to apply their own bias to the report outside of company policy. With a 50 mins reversal of the takedown, that seems plausible.

If they are not outright lying, it does seem like the title is accurate and not at all misleading. It does sound like a moderation mishap.

If I recall, the video was not taken down. Her account was still active so people could see the video, but her access to the account was blocked for a month.

It’s ironic because TikTok was getting a lot of flak in the news recently because they were too slow to remove actual terrorist propaganda. So they probably went overboard and it resulted in this situation.

Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

>but her access to the account was blocked for a month.

Do you mean she actually experienced 1 month of blockage, or that they planned to block her for a month but actually didn't.

The article says she was only blocked for 2-3 days (Nov 25 until now).

The press release specifically states that the video was taken down: "November 27, 2019 @ 7:06am ET – Due to a human moderation error, the viral video from November 23 was removed."

Want to add to this. Tiktok blatantly violates Google's device ID policy, and actually admits it in writing.

> We share your device ID with measurement companies so that we can link your activity on the Platform with your activity on other websites;

My contact at google said a year ago when I asked if they know about Alibaba's device ID abuse for advertising targeting, it's their policy to not to touch Chinese companies' device ID abuse.

>As for the video takedown... you may underestimate the consistency of human moderators. They are often under intense time pressures and mistakes are made all the time. There is also the potential for individual moderators to apply their own bias to the report outside of company policy. With a 50 mins reversal of the takedown, that seems plausible.

And how that does excuse them? If company cannot handle quality moderation with current workforce they should invest in either more qualified people, more people or tooling.

User, and customer to generalize, should not care about that - to them company/service is a black box that provides desired output for their input(content, money, personal information etc).

Whatever goes inside box is of no relevance.

I can get empathizing with employees - in fact everyone should do that, but empathizing with a company? Hell no.

You are never going to get perfect performance and correctness from any kind of moderation. You will always underfit and overfit the set of allowed content.

This kind of complaints are missing the point. Youtube allowed predatory copyright claims without any kind of burden of proof on the claimant (only recently they punished a copyright troll). If this was indeed a mistake of human moderation AND the platform is not plagued with them, then I don't understand what you are expecting of them; having so many moderators to have 0% error rate?

> I don't understand what you are expecting of them; having so many moderators to have 0% error rate?

That sounds like a reasonable expectation, yes.

If a company doesn't achieve it or is not even making incremental progress towards it, then it should come under fire.

I'm sure you only use systems with 100% uptime too.

This position is either incomplete or untenable.

If you allow me a strawman, the only possible outcome of this is to only expect perfection from everyone, thus building a society based on hiding forever any and all your mistakes.

A satirical twitter account impersonating Satan once twitted "one sin or a thousand sin and you and in hell anyway. Why not go for a billion and come down like a hero?"

I am not saying your opinion is wrong, but it absolutely needs a concept of redemption for balance

Sure, I didn't mean that the company must be disbanded as soon as they make their first moderation error.

But perhaps they should pay a small fine for each account erroneously censored, so that they have a clear incentive to get better. (Who would levy that fine, in the context of multinational corporations, is a separate debate.)

I am more interested in who would design such fines. One of the great delusions we live in is that complex social problems have simple solutions.

As a practical example public train service in Germany was privatized some decades ago; obviously to guarantee quality the contract stipulate some quotas that need to be reached, one of these is that delays needs to be below a certain level; here comes a captcha, if a train is cancelled it does not count as a delay.

So the financial incentives are essentially to have little (but non zero) delays and cancel all trains with a above average delay.

You cannot game the system and expect the system is not going to game you.

Or better, are you going to be prepared for the consequence of a policy like the one you propose in practice?

> If a company doesn't achieve it or is not even making incremental progress towards it, then it should come under fire.

Tiktok AFAICR doesn't have the poor systems that say various Google products do for example. I'm not aware of a pattern of behavior on their front, just suspicion.

What's your job? Do you do that with a 0% error rate? I certainly don't.

The video removed was not close to any of the prohibited categories, so it's misdirection to say you can't get to 0% error rate. The claimed "error" is not an edge case that well-intended moderators might make an honest mistake on. Falling back to statistics just obscures that.

As a counterclaim I would say that your comment is misdirection of how moderation works in a big platform.

I have no insider knowledge, but for example last week a big Youtube channel had many of its followers banned because they were spamming (solicited) emojis in chat.

Somewhere deep in the moderation stack that tripped an edge case of spamming/abuse/who-knows-what (not youtube apparently, they had no idea how this happened

I expect them to work under the assumption of "innocent until proven guilty", not vice versa(which is easier: just do a huge banwave, and restore few complaining people as others won't care to fight for it)

> I don’t think this certainty about this being “PR bullshit” is warranted at all, and feels a bit like knee-jerk cynicism.

It's always warranted. It's Public Relations, not Public Information, and it's created exactly to convey the best public image that they can muster given the circumstances. Official statements like it should always be regarded with suspicion, because there is little incentive to explain the situation fairly when not doing so is likely to convey a better public image.

It's funny, because if we called it "propaganda" (which PR essentially is) and all agreed that it is, no one would accuse you of being cynical for not trusting it at face value.

That's probably true, they want to convey the best image they can. I feel like people are trying to insinuate something more sinister is going on, like they are lying.

Tbh, compare that to the response of youtube takedowns and (rather poor) human moderation which are famously terrible. I'm not sure about Tik Tok but a human undoing a bad action in 50 min should be lauded. It's only because it's a politically charged subject people will see bias no matter which way they look at it.

> Banning multiaccounts for severe infractions makes sense, and it also makes sense that this account could have been caught up in that.

I am on the fence on this one.

The first ban was over satire. Tiktok recognizes not being open to satire, which is refreshingly straightforward in a way, yet still giving me pause for a social media. Especialy when it’s not the co tent just taken down but the whole account banned.

The “multi-account” part then comes from the girl using the same phone to create a second account after the first one got banned. It’s not an elaborate scheme to game the system and auto praise her videos, or an account farm or that kind of behavior. She would have had a single account if the first one was still alive.

All in all they make it seem like she did a lot of very unrully things when for most other platforms it would have been totally OK behavior.

In particular spending that much time to make her look controversial for satire and humanist speach is unwarranted.

You forgot to mention that they dumped it on the evening before a US holiday. This is a classic PR strategy to stay out of the headlines.

News outlets should have a special feature after each holiday for the headlines dumped right before said holiday in an attempt to escape notice. Not only do they get coverage, but the deceptiveness of the timing is highlighted. I can see this being a good fit for news/entertainment like Stephen Colbert.

It's not just holidays, it's every Friday. It's called "taking out the trash." And since most broadcast newsrooms are on skeleton crews after 5pm on Friday, the bad news usually doesn't get reported until Sunday, if at all.

Good point. We should probably do it every Monday too.

They made the statement today because the video was taken down (and reinstated) this morning.

You forgot that they posted the news the same day that it happened was fixed. Should they have delayed the fix until after the weekend to avoid the bad optics?

Well it did happen yesterday so...

No. You missed the point. TikTok is a Chinese company. They still need to do business in China. They can't give an impression that the Party was wrong.

That doesn’t make me feel any better about TikTok

Then you should understand that they operate with harder constraints than making every random Joe feel better about themselves.

And why would customer care about that?

seriously, why?

Because this sort of thing should inform the expectations that customer holds of the business, of what they can entrust the business with and what better to take elsewhere, how to expect them to act now and in the future. Like, businesses are not actually black boxes in the same way that not all actors in any realistic marketplace ever have perfect knowledge. Useful abstractions, but only up to a point. You got any inside-ish info? Use it to your advantage if you can.

If you know they are subject to that kind of pressure, would you launch your "We stand with the Uighurs" campaign there? Maybe yes, maybe no, but you should consider that carefully. Or maybe you wouldn't want them to gather data on you at all, if you are, say, involved with the Hong Kong resistance or whatever. And maybe, knowing this, you would want to take your data and attention elsewhere just on principle.

Given what we know today, would you trust Facebook to not do any secret shady business with your data? Wouldn't you make that part of a decision where one outcome might give them a lot more data on you?

That's why such info is very much of relevance to customers. That's why they try so hard to control the spin on things like that, because it's harmful if their background gets too much attention.

Oh i have nothing against prior research, but when issue just happens - why would you care for a reason as a customer?

I do not trust any corporation.. well i do trust them - that they'll do everything they can to profit the most. That includes facebook, as i find no purpose to using social media.

Even better reason that users should flee the service.

"PR bullshit"? They said they made a mistake, apologized and reinstated the account -- what more do you want them to do?

Compare with, say, this pathetic excuse of a non-apology apology from Stack Overflow: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to...

If someone wants to suggest a better title that's both accurate and neutral, we can change it.

'TikTok Concedes Error In Removing Viral Video'

I agree this would be better.

I hear you, but we try hard to use representative language from the article [1] rather than making something new up. For example, to say "concedes" is already crossing into editorializing. On the other hand, bland corporate press release titles on mea culpa posts are misleading [2], which means that the site guidelines call for changing them: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." [3]

The solution is to search for the point where the article actually says what it's about—it has to eventually, or there's no culpa in the mea culpa. I looked through the article and think I found it, so have put that in the title above.

I should have thought of this earlier, since it's one of our standard tactics.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

2. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You are truly an inspiration for what online moderation can be. Thank you.

At least adding the name of the company would help. If not rephrasing it to something like ..."on recent moderation mistakes".

We actually took the name of the company out, because of the site guidelines:

If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I submit that you're reading a little too deep into this statement and their actions. Hanlon's razor and all that.

I think you do need to give a lot of context for people who just followed a random link from somewhere? But maybe there's a better way to do it.

There is a better way to do it: you leave the incorrect reason out and focus on the mistake, and perhaps consider stating what you are doing to avoid making this mistake or others like it in the future.

I thought the whole thing looked like a reasonable account of the factors that lead to a human error, myself.

> about a content moderation mishap

The video was offline for 50 minutes: hardly a big deal, or even a moderate deal.

I think there's a lot of people (in the West) who are happy to criticise anything Chinese, for the slightest possible reason.

In case you haven't noticed, there is a trade war going on, and this is the propaganda front.

>You've gotta love the PR bullshit of it all.

You have no supporting statements or evidence backing up this claim.

> If companies want to know why they can't regain trust and aren't given the benefit of the doubt, it's because they cannot be honest in situations like this. PR in the 21st century is about communicating how you have in fact messed up because you are humans, not trying to gloss over it and distract from it like some corporate overlord.

So you think that companies cannot make mistakes?