“There was lots of bullying, harassment, exclusion from the team, from projects. A lot of things were going on.”
For the first time, former TikTok worker Lynda Ouazar is speaking out to expose what she says was an environment of bullying, harassment and union busting at one of the world’s biggest social media companies.
“I was finding it really hard to sleep at night, having flashbacks, feeling tired, losing my motivation,” she tells Sky News.
Along with four of her former colleagues, she is now launching legal action against TikTok. This is the second court case the video app is facing from former UK employees in recent months.
Lynda started at the company as a moderator and then as a quality control worker, checking the work of external agency moderators.
At first, she enjoyed the job and found it rewarding.
But then, she was moved on to a workflow dealing with some of the most extreme content posted on TikTok.
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“You don’t want to see children being sexually assaulted, you don’t want to see women going through all kinds of abuse, you don’t want to see people self-harming, […] using slur words all day long.
“It affected me.”
Despite the type of content she was watching day in, day out, Lynda says there wasn’t much support to keep moderators safe, and to ensure they were able to moderate TikTok’s content effectively.
TikTok does tell moderators to take breaks when they need them and offers a mental health support platform.
But Lynda, and other moderators that Sky News has spoken to recently, say that in practice, they did not feel supported.
Instead, they felt pressured to work faster and harder, no matter how disturbing the content.
“You are monitored by AI all day long,” she says.
This accusation that moderators are constantly monitored and feel pressured is something Sky News has previously been told by other moderators at the company.
“Moderators find themselves pressurised to deliver, so they have to carry on, even if you see something which really affects you and you feel like you have tears in your eyes,” says Lynda.
“Sometimes you cry but then you carry on working because you have to reach those targets. Otherwise, your bonus will be affected, your job security, your salary, everything will be affected.”
She says that pressure has a direct impact on user safety.
“When you work under pressure and you are under speed and you make errors, it means that things that should not be in the platform are actually still there.
“It’s not good for the moderators, it is not good for the users of the platform.”
That being said, according to its latest transparency report, TikTok removes more than 99% of harmful content before it is reported.
According to data gathered for the EU’s Digital Services Act, it also has the lowest error rates and highest accuracy rates in moderation among all major social media platforms.
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After two years at TikTok, Lynda joined the United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) union and became a union rep. This is when she started to feel like she was being bullied and harassed and believes it was because of her union membership.
“It took me some time, I would say a few months, to see the pattern.”
She says as well as facing exclusion and bullying, her performance was downgraded from the highest possible rating to the lowest – but wasn’t given a proper explanation as to why, even when she raised a grievance.
“Other employees who [previously] had no problems at all, which I helped recruit to become union members, also started going through the same pattern as myself.”
When TikTok began a major restructuring programme to change how it moderates content last year, Lynda’s team were told they were at risk. Of the 24 people at risk of redundancy, 11 lost their jobs.
According to the lawsuit, all of them had been openly involved in union activity at TikTok.
Stella Caram, head of legal at Foxglove, is helping to represent the former workers in the legal case.
“In this case specifically, we want compensation for the workers. They have been unlawfully dismissed because they were engaging with union activities,” she tells Sky News.
“We wanted to make this a precedent because we’ve seen a lot of this happening across the world.”
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TikTok told Sky News: “We strongly reject these baseless and inaccurate claims.
“We have made ongoing enhancements to our safety technologies and content moderation, which are borne out by the facts: a record rate of violative content removed by automated technology (91%) and record volume of violative content removed in under 24 hours (95%).”
