Incident 132: TikTok’s Content Moderation Allegedly Failed to Adequately Take down Videos Promoting Eating Disorders

Description: Videos promoting eating disorders evaded TikTok's automated violation detection system without difficulty via common misspellings of search terms, bypassing its ban of violating hashtags such as "proana" and "anorexia".

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Alleged: TikTok developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed TikTok users and TikTok users under 18 years old.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
132
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2020-12-27
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
TikTok Anorexia Videos Misspell Hashtags to Beat the 'Pro-Ana' Ban
insider.com · 2020

TikTok said it banned six accounts reported to it for posting content promoting eating habits that are likely to lead to health problems in its latest effort to crackdown on harmful content.

The app is rife with dangerous material including…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.