YouTube, TikTok and Snap go to Congress Tuesday. Here's why their fates may vary: by abebrown716
, have long voiced strident opposition to TikTok, declaring it a risk a national security and fearing China’s community government could manipulate it. latest transparency report
, the company said it removed 81.5 million pieces of offending content during the first half of 2021. What’s powering those take-downs? A combined effort of man and machine: human moderators reviewing videos and some internal software to catch bad posts. Hickey has recently sought to test the effectiveness of TikTok’s dectective work.
And then there’s Snap. Its app has mostly avoided becoming a misinformation hotbed. Why? “The content doesn't go viral in the same way. It's ephemeral,” says Douek, the Harvard lecturer. Plus, those self-deleting messages mostly get traded between friends or acquaintances, making it harder for harmful posts to reach a viral scale on the same level as they might on other social media networks. “But it is a user-generated-content platform.
“We look forward to appearing before the subcommitte to discuss our approach to protecting the safety, privacy and wellbeing of our Snapchat community,” a Snap spokeswoman says. The company will dispatch Jen Stout, vice president of global public policy, as its Congressional witness. Snap maintains a devoted following among teens and young adults: Nearly a quarter of its 300 million-plus monthly users are 19 and under,