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TikTok turns to experts amid government scrutiny in Africa

Sep 25, 2024, 9:11am EDT
africa
Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
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The News

NAIROBI — TikTok is looking to calm governments’ nerves across Africa as it rolls out new measures meant to improve its content moderation across the continent.

The company set up an advisory council last month to inform its policies on the continent. It also updated community guidelines to take into account cultural norms in the countries it operates in and to be clearer to creators.

Fortune Sibanda, the company’s head of public policy and government relations in Africa, told Semafor Africa that the company had in recent months been working to “demystify misconceptions” about its work. The push comes amid mounting scrutiny into the ByteDance owned-app from governments around the continent as its popularity skyrockets.

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The eight-person council is composed of African experts drawn from different sectors who will advise the company on its approach on various issues in different African countries.

They include Ethiopian academic Prof Medhane Tadesse, Nigeria’s Dr Akinola Olojo — an expert on countering violent extremism, and Kenya’s Lilian Kariuki, founder of child online safety organization Watoto Watch Network. Others are Ghanaian content creator Dennis Coffie and Aisha Dabo, co-founder of Senegalese pro-democracy organization AfricTivistes

“They will support us in developing forward looking policies that not only address the challenges we face today, but also identify existing and emerging issues in Africa which affect TikTok and our community, and develop strategies to tackle these challenges,” Sibanda said.

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A survey conducted by Geopoll in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa last year found that TikTok was the second most popular social media platform by active user engagement, ahead of Instagram and X. It only trailed Facebook. Governments in Africa have been pushing for closer regulation of TikTok even with calls for partial or complete bans from some quarters.

Egyptian authorities in August announced that they would seek the implementation of enhanced mechanisms to monitor content on TikTok to ensure its commitment to Egyptian values, as opposed to a full ban.

Ahmed Badawi, head of the Communications and Information Technology Committee in the House of Representatives, also revealed efforts to create laws allowing for the monitoring of pages posting content deemed not to align with societal values.

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Earlier this year, Kenya’s government also introduced a requirement for TikTok to publish quarterly compliance reports on action taken against inappropriate and explicit content.

Sibanda said the company was working with 18 global fact-checking organizations to “assess the accuracy of content in more than 70 languages, including African languages.” This is in addition to a human content moderation team and content moderation technology.

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Martin’s view

TikTok has faced significant criticism over its content moderation efforts in Africa in recent years, with some arguing that it often misses local context, languages and cultures. In Kenya, this even fueled a petition to ban the application over the past year.

Genuine discontent over content moderation and user safety, however, can be piggybacked on by governments looking to exert greater control over the flow of information. TikTok, with its growing prominence in Africa, has become a key source of political information including news, civic education, analysis and propaganda by various groups.

TikTok’s latest efforts represent the company’s desire to reduce the risks presented by a failure to understand the unique features of the countries it operates in, including their histories, values, and cultures.

Notably, some analysts fear that a ban on TikTok in the United States could “embolden African governments” to pursue similar measures, albeit for political purposes. TikTok faces a ban in the United States unless it sells its unit in the country to a non-Chinese owner.

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