Social media giants like Meta have been cutting professional content moderators en masse in favor of community-based moderation, while platforms like Musk’s X now operate vastly reduced human content moderation teams compared to its Twitter days.
Now, TikTok plans to lay off hundreds of content moderators in a fresh AI pivot. The move, reported by The Wall Street Journal, will mainly impact members of a 2,500-person team based in the UK, but many employees from South and Southeast Asia will also be affected. However, exact numbers were not disclosed.
Over 85% of content removed from the platform for violating its guidelines is already identified and taken down by AI, TikTok told the Journal. This isn’t the first time that TikTok has announced major layoffs to its moderation teams in favor of automation. In late 2024, the ByteDance-owned platform cut 500 employees from the team, mainly based in Malaysia. In July, trade union group ver.di said that around 150 employees in its office in Berlin, Germany were set to replaced by AI models.
The sources didn’t reveal why it picked now to cut moderators from its UK team. Last month, the Online Safety Act came into force, meaning that online platforms operating in the UK could be fined up to 10% of their global turnover, or up to £18 million—whichever is larger—if they fail to protect minors from harmful content.
However, The Financial Times noted that the layoffs came just one week before staff in London were due to vote on unionization, a move it said the company’s management had been resisting, citing sources within the company.
“We are continuing a reorganization that we started last year to strengthen our global operating model for Trust and Safety, which includes concentrating our operations in fewer locations globally to ensure that we maximize effectiveness and speed as we evolve this critical function for the company with the benefit of technological advancements,” an official TikTok spokesperson told the FT.
John Chadfield, a national organizer at the Communication Workers Union, argued in a statement to the FT that TikTok doesn’t “want to have human moderators, their goal is to have it all done by AI.”
“AI makes them sound smart and cutting-edge, but they’re actually just going to offshore it,” he added.
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About Will McCurdy
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