Physical visits to the Transparency and Accountability Centers TikTok opened in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have been put on hold by the coronavirus, so the video-creation platform has done the next best thing by taking them virtual.
Vice president and head of U.S. public policy Michael Beckerman said in a blog post Thursday that nearly two-dozen experts and Congressional offices have visited TikTok’s virtual Transparency and Accountability Center to learn about its safety and security practices.
Part of the virtual Transparency and Accountability Center is dedicated to explaining how TikTok’s moderators review content and accounts that are escalated via user reports and machine learning, giving visitors a detailed look at its safety classifiers and the deep learning models that proactively identify harmful content, as well as the decision engine that ranks the content to aid moderation teams with their reviews.
Beckerman said that once the physical centers can be visited, guests will be able to sit in the seat of a content moderator, use TikTok’s moderation platform, review and label sample content and experiment with detection models.
TikTok will also share details on how its recommendation engine works and how user experience and safety are built into those recommendations. Beckerman wrote, “This includes sharing how our systems work to diversify content in the For You feed and additional insights into how content is tailored to the preferences of each user.”
Finally, on privacy and security, he wrote, “Under the leadership of our chief security officer, Roland Cloutier—who has decades of experience in law enforcement and the financial services industry—our teams work to protect our community’s information and stay ahead of evolving security challenges. Our virtual experience shows visitors how we store TikTok user data in the U.S. and safeguard that data from hackers and other threats with encryption and the latest technology. We also detail how we work with industry-leading third-party experts—the same ones used by the federal government—to test and validate our security processes. In our physical centers, we’ll also give experts a first-hand look at how we keep our platform safe 24 hours a day, seven days a week through a cutting-edge fusion center.”