source : the age
Zachary Hecht, from TikTok, is now taking the commission through the process for removing content under its “safety and civility guidelines”.
Those guidelines “strictly prohibit violent threats, hate speech, harassment, bullying, sexual misconduct, and dangerous activities”, according to TikTok.
The commission is being told that in 2025, more than 336 million videos were posted to TikTok, with 270,749 removed for violating the safety and civility guidelines.
In the first quarter of this year, 110 million videos were published and 67,012 were removed for violations. Hecht also has details on Australian content.
TikTok’s hate speech and hateful behaviour guidelines are being shown to the commission, which includes a detailed list of “protected attributes” the social media platform uses to rule on content.
A list of TikTok’s banned content, which includes “supporting or spreading hateful ideology”, is also being shown to the commission.
According to TikTok’s guidelines, banned content includes “claims of supremacy over a protected group, such as white supremacy, misogyny and LGBTQ+ hate, antisemitism or Islamophobia”.
It also includes “hateful conspiracies targeting a protected group, such as the Great Replacement Theory or claims that Jewish people control the media”.
TikTok’s Zachary Hecht has been asked whether “the list of protected attributes is longer and more specific than a number of other social media platforms”.
Hecht says: “I am focused on the TikTok platform, and I’m not sure of what the list of other platforms would be in this moment, but what I can say is, this list is informed by global human rights standards.”
TikTok is taking the royal commission seriously. The first witness Zachary Hecht, TikTok’s global head of policy, trust and safety, is New York-based but has told the inquiry that he specifically travelled to Sydney to voluntarily provide evidence.
Its approach is very different from some other US-based social media companies, with which the commission has tried to engage.
In the first week of this block of hearings, counsel assisting Richard Lancaster said platforms X and Telegram had refused to engage with the inquiry, while the far-right Gab network had been “openly hostile”.
“It has become increasingly apparent that the online environment and social media platforms in particular are perhaps the most significant vector for the spread of antisemitism and hate in the community,” Lancaster told the commission last week.
Social media giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was the first company to appear before the commission on Monday and spent plenty of time detailing a relatively new policy.
That policy, announced by Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg after US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House early last year, is designed to ensure content is not “over-enforced”.
Benjamin Good, the global director of the core policy team at Meta, explained to the commission that the company had introduced the policy in January 2025 to focus on reactive removal of hateful content over proactive action.
Another company that also appeared on Monday was the Melbourne-based live-streaming site Kick, which the commission heard had a low rate of content removal despite a high number of “reports”.
Tiat Oon Ooi, the general counsel for EasyGo Group, which owns Kick, told the commission that the lower rates were probably due to “false alarms or false reports”, but he insisted that Kick had processes in place that “go above and beyond any other social media platforms”.
Hello, I am Alexandra Smith and I will be with you today as the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion continues in Sydney.
We will be hearing more from the social media companies today, with TikTok’s Zachary Hecht – the global head of policy, trust and safety – first up.
The commission on Monday heard from the non-profit global organisation Cyberwell, set up to fight online antisemitism.
Its founder, Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, told the commission that TikTok has the highest rate of removing “violative content” once it has been reported by her organisation, with 88.8 per cent of content taken down. The average removal rate across the platforms it works with (which also include Facebook, Instagram and YouTube) is 52.4 per cent.
Rachel Lord, YouTube’s senior manager of government affairs and public policy for Australia and New Zealand, will also give evidence today.
