TikTok deployed crisis teams to prevent footage of the Bondi terror attack spreading on its platform within an hour and a half of the massacre, despite having no Australian content moderators.
The Chinese-owned social media giant employs specialist teams to stop emerging trends online before they go viral, officials told the anti-Semitism royal commission.
“It’s like our basic police force versus a SWAT team,” TikTok’s global head of partnerships, elections and market integrity Valiant Richey told the inquiry on Tuesday.
But while TikTok employs 760 staff and 16 contractors in Sydney and Melbourne, Mr Richey said none of them were involved in content moderation.
“(Content moderators are) based in a large number of locations around the world … for a variety of different reasons that might relate to labour supply, to language, to local regulations – it’s a complex system,” he said.
When pressed, Mr Richey said he didn’t know why there were no moderators in Australia.
Unlike Meta, which has recently wound back its content moderation and fact-checking efforts, every piece of content uploaded to TikTok goes through automated moderation, company representatives said.
“We also have human moderation at the point of upload, (but) auto moderation oversees everything,” TikTok’s global head of policy, trust and safety Zachary Hecht said.
Of the more than 110 million videos uploaded in the first three months of 2026, just over 67,000 were removed under TikTok’s safety and civility policy, the majority using artificial intelligence, Mr Hecht said.
The New York-based executive, who travelled to Australia to give evidence, said TikTok’s policies had been based on conversations with members of the Jewish community and hate speech experts.
Analysis by online anti-Semitism database CyberWell showed about 93 per cent of posts violating content rules were removed on TikTok, compared to 77 per cent on Meta’s platforms and 37 per cent on YouTube.
CyberWell earlier revealed young people had been targeted with anti-Semitic memes based on the popular cartoon My Little Pony, likely distributed by an Australian account.
One post using the cartoon character said it was impossible to bake six million muffins, CyberWell founder and chief executive Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor told the inquiry.
The comment was a coded form of Holocaust denial and used the children’s content to spread its message to young people, she said.
“You’re priming them to also see the Holocaust and the story of the Holocaust through the lens of denial,” Ms Cohen Montemayor said.
The US-born resident of Israel established CyberWell in 2022 to track online anti-Semitism.
While most platforms were fairly effective at policing Holocaust denial, other forms of Jew hatred often slipped through the cracks and more was needed to better categorise forms of hate speech online, Ms Cohen Montemayor said.
Representatives from YouTube are also scheduled to front the inquiry on Tuesday.
Australian Associated Press is the beating heart of Australian news. AAP is Australia’s only independent national newswire and has been delivering accurate, reliable and fast news content to the media industry, government and corporate sector for 85 years. We keep Australia informed.
