It took just a few hours, after the public announcement last Thursday by the Chair of AMA, Armela Krasniqi, regarding the start of the collaboration with the TikTok platform, so the reports of harmful content posted on this platform to increase in numbers.
Five days after the start of this collaboration and the opening of a dedicated link on the official website of the Audiovisual Media Authority, where the public can report content they deem harmful, the first results have emerged. These reports involve content containing violence, hate speech, abuse of children and communities, or violations of fundamental rights.
Within the first 5 days of this collaboration, 85 complaints were received by AMA. After being reviewed by the legal teams and the Council of Complaints at AMA, 40 of these complaints were reported to the TikTok platform for legal violations. Of these, 23 videos were removed from TikTok, and 17 are still under review. The deleted videos contained:
- 7 videos exposing children to pornography, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and violence;
- 5 videos promoting violence and hate speech, or videos containing criminal acts;
- 4 videos depicting acts of violence;
- 1 video with religious hate speech;
- 1 video with hate speech based on sexual orientation.
What stands out in the published data are the piracy cases, which appear to have circulated widely and freely on TikTok until now.
So for the same 5-day period, 156 videos were reported for audiovisual piracy, of which 112 were removed from the platform, and 20 profiles were immediately shut down for the same reason, after the videos were reported.
“We did not anticipate such a flow of reports,” said Krasniqi about the collaboration. “We are grateful to the citizens who have reported, demonstrating high public sensitivity and trust in the institution. We are thankful for this collaboration with TikTok. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
