Last weekend, it began to appear on social media that TikTok workers in Malaysia and Indonesia were suddenly fired. Now, the WSJ has confirmed that thousands of employees in Southeast Asia and the United Kingdom have been terminated because their jobs were taken over by artificial intelligence (AI).
In the UK, 2,400 content moderators have been fired. The number of employees fired in Southeast Asia is still unknown because there is no law requiring them to be reported to the labor department.
85% of content that violates the site's terms of service is identified by AI before being removed, making human employees no longer needed. This is bad news for TikTok's content moderators because late last year, 500 were fired, 481 of them in Malaysia.
The use of AI in place of humans is also worrisome because TikTok now labels pro-Palestinian content that says the Israeli military (IDF) as terrorists and will be automatically deleted. The recent appointment of a former IDF soldier as the IDF's content manager has received worldwide protests, including from the Minister of Communications, Datuk Fahmi Fadzil.