TikTok has asked Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit platforms to join it in establishing a partnership to better combat content depicting self-harm and suicide after clips from a Facebook livestream of a man taking his own life circulated around TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and more for weeks earlier this month.

The CEO of TikTok Vanessa Pappas is proposing a coalition to protect social media users from harmful content. The CEO of TikTok, has written to nine heads of social and content platforms seeking to form a coalition to protect against harmful content. She is calling for a system to help platforms quickly notify each other of harmful content like graphic violence and suicide.

In a press release today the company stated:

Each individual effort by a platform to safeguard its users would be made more effective through a formal, collaborative approach to early identification and notification amongst companies. Such collaboration is already happening when it comes to certain content most people agree are dangerous or harmful, such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM). But there’s a critical need to work together to protect people from extremely violent, graphic content, including suicide. To this end, we would like to propose the cooperative development of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will allow us to quickly notify one another of such content that would encourage companies to warn one another of such violent, graphic content on their own platforms.

TikTok Statement

TikTok is proposing the creation of a hashbank for violent and graphic content to significantly reduce the change that people see violent and graphic content, enduring emotional harm in the process.

What we are proposing is that, the same way these companies already work together around child sexual imagery and terrorist-related content, we should now establish a partnership around dealing with this type of content.

Theo Bertram – TikTok EU Head