TikTok Israel removes almost 700,000 videos for ‘hateful content’

Israel’s government submits almost 10% of TikTok’s content removal requests

An Israeli spokesperson from the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs announced on Monday that content moderators of the social media app, TikTok, removed 688,579 videos from the platform in the third quarter of 2022 alone.

TikTok says it received 2,713 requests from various international governments to remove or limit content or accounts in the third quarter of 2022. The company removed 110,954,663 videos worldwide that were uploaded to the platform during this time. The number represents approximately 1% of all videos uploaded to TikTok in that quarter.

The company says that 2% of videos removed worldwide were deleted due to hateful content.

The Israeli government submitted 252 content-removal requests to TikTok, amounting to just over 9% of the total takedown requests worldwide. In the same timeframe, the U.S. government only requested 13 takedowns, while Germany, a country with stricter hate speech laws than the U.S., submitted 167 requests.

TikTok explained that the Israeli government is a leading government in content-removal requests.

Representatives of the social media company recently met with Israeli officials to discuss ways to deal with anti-Semitic content on the platform. Knesset Member Oded Forer, chairperson of the Israeli government’s Aliyah, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Committee, and World Zionist Organization chairperson, Yaakov Hagoel, attended the meeting.

“Incitement on social media is a problem that needs to be dealt with in-depth,” Forer said, noting that, because of incitement, “many Jews around the world choose to hide their religious symbols in their clothing in order not to be exposed to [discovery by anti-Semites] and attacks on the street.”

“It is clear to everyone that the extreme discourse on social networks increases and encourages acts of terrorism against Jews,” Forer said, adding that he is asking the World Zionist Organization to prepare a report on anti-Semitic incidents on social networks.

Hagoel complained about the prevalence of anti-Semitic content online.

“Today, when you type ‘Jew’ into Google, you get 10 top results of anti-Semitic websites that incite against Jews,” he said.