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NEW YORK: Popular short video app TikTok said on Monday (September 7) that it was removing a clip of a suicide circulating on its platform and was banning accounts that repeatedly tried to upload the clip.
TikTok did not specify the video, but at least two media reports said videos of a man shooting himself with a gun had been circulating on TikTok since Sunday night.
“We are aware that clips of a suicide that were streamed live on Facebook have recently circulated on other platforms, including TikTok. Our systems have been automatically detecting and flagging these clips for violating our Community Guidelines,” TikTok said on Twitter .
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters to specify the video clip it removed. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TikTok, whose China-based owner Bytedance was ordered by President Donald Trump to sell its US operations, has been criticized for its content moderation policy in the past, especially in the circulation of graphic content.
The company implemented a new content moderation infrastructure in December under which it tagged videos that were removed by the company with the policy category they violated, it said in its transparency report released in July.