KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 12): TikTok's move to reduce its employees will not affect its operations and the company is cooperating with the authorities in this country, especially in the aspects of research and screening of content and live sessions.

Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil said that based on his meeting with TikTok Malaysia on Friday, the company informed that the number of workers in the country is still high, at around 3,700 people, with lay-offs involving 481 workers.

"In fact, TikTok will open several new positions and increase the number of employees because there are several new services they will provide including cloud computing and data centres.

"TikTok informs that wherever it operates, there is a moderation team, indeed the number of employees in this department is reduced but it does not have any negative impact on their operations in Malaysia and does not affect its cooperation with the Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM) and the Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC),” he said.

He said this when met by reporters after attending the Lembah Pantai Health Programme with IMU Cares at PPR Kerinchi here on Saturday.

Fahmi said that the termination was made by the company due to the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to screen and moderate TikTok content.

"So the team that they have reduced in size are employees who are doing manual moderation. So here we see in general the duties that may be repetitive and manual are affected by the use of AI," he said.

Fahmi, however, also asked TikTok to manually add moderators for content or live sessions in Chinese and Tamil, especially in the middle and late at night.

"They are in the process of increasing the number of manual moderators and I also request that they improve the content monitoring protocol especially for TikTok live which sometimes happens in the middle of the night.

"As an example, the problem of cyber bullying in the TikTok live session happened at 1am, 3am and the moderation team was not operating at that time and this is a shortcoming. They are aware and are improving their operations," he said.

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