It is a decisive year for being in India: Tiktok director Helena Lersch

With the Lok Sabha election two months away, Helena Lersch, global public policy director of TikTok is a busy woman. Lersch has working to set up a war room that will monitor Indian election related activity in real time, and keep all possible channels of communication open with not just the Election Commission of India but also other government agencies. In a conversation with Neha Alawadhi and Karan Choudhury, Lersch talks about the challenges facing the Chinese content platform and how it is here to stay. Edited excerpts:

How is it going for you in India?

It is one of our biggest markets (TikTok has a user base of 54 million users in India by some estimates). I honestly think we had an overwhelmingly positive response in India. Very excited to be here. We are building and growing a bigger team in India. It’s a decisive year for being in India for us.

You have been in the news for a lot of issues around hate speech, porn, fake news, governments like Tamil Nadu considering a ban. How are you looking at these problems?

This is a problem of huge importance, and one which other platforms face as much as we do. We have robust measures in place. We have reporting mechanisms, community guidelines, and allow content that follows our community guidelines that forbid hate speech, violent content, pornographic content, minors. So the moment we are made aware of such content, we take it down with a team that works on that 24x7. 

We have a large content moderation team in place. In Tamil Nadu, we never got banned. I don’t think they were even considering a ban. We have a grievance officer in place who is engaging with the law enforcement agencies  across the country. So we are in close touch with the government on such issues

We think this is very important, and are working on getting this right. 

How big are these content moderation teams and how regional?

Our content moderation team in India operates in 15 Indian languages, and sits in Delhi and Mumbai. Our content moderation teams globally have grown 400 per cent last year. We are aware that our platform is hyperlocal and are ensuring we cater to local sensibilities. 

Has the Election Commission of India (EC) raised any specific issues with TikTok?

We reached out to the EC proactively because it has one of the biggest jobs in this country — running elections. We wanted to let them know that we have an escalation mechanism.  There are people they can reach out to 24x7. Further, we have also given them an explicit way to reach us in person. 

They have not raised any issues with us. We are working on an election task force, which looks at all the issues across India — hashtags, news, what is going viral so we make sure that we can run a responsible election on the platform. 

We also do not do political advertising. A lot of focus of the EC is on transparency in political advertising and we don’t do political advertising at all. We are also not engaging with politicians or parties on their campaigns. So we don’t do paid hashtag campaigns with political parties at all. 

We are engaging with the nodal officers of the EC and are here to abide by the local laws and model code of conduct.

Could you please elaborate on the election task force?

We have a cross functional election task force, which means there is public relations, public policy, content moderation, escalation. 

There are a lot of functions working on the India task force to ensure that the election is safe. That is a real time task for us. When the EC observes an issue on TikTok, they can reach out using an escalation email that is monitored 24x7. They have three nodal officers on the EC side, and we have opened up several ways of communication with them including my personal phone number. 

We have been working on this task force for weeks and made sure everyone on the job has read the model code of conduct and understood them.

How much of political content have you noticed on TikTok?

We definitely have some political content on the platform. This is also user generated. So we are making sure (to monitor) especially the most popular political content that we know of. So we’re monitoring popular political hashtags content and we look at it to make sure there is no hate speech and violence. If you look at the political content versus other content, it is very miniscule. 

There have been protests by the right wing organisations about you being of Chinese origin, and this intensifies when tensions escalate in the neighbourhood due to broader geopolitical context. Do you see the Chinese tag becoming a liability?

We are really working on our Indian team. Our teams in India comprise of Indians. We are not commenting on the broader geopolitcs but I am extremely positive about the broader prospects in India. 

You’ve been banned in Indonesia and fined in the United States. How are you looking at these issues. Why do you think this is happening?

Indonesia is a very interesting case. We were blocked for less than four days and then we had very good conversations with the government in Indonesia and by now we enjoy an excellent relationship with Kominfo (the IT ministry of Indonesia). 

In Indonesia, the situation has turned around so much that now we are a fully government supported platform, and Kominfo actually is now on TikTok. 

We are expanding our teams so we abide by the local laws and have escalation mechanisms in place. 

The issue in the US comes from the Musical.ly days (which TikTok acquired), which we have settled with them.

We are a responsible player. We know we need to be ahead of these issues, we need to engage with the government and we need to understand the local challenges. 

How are you engaging with the government in India?

We are engaging with the relevant ministries — the IT ministry, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Election Commission. We’re making sure that they know how to reach us, and have a proactive strategy to engage with them. It is very important for us to be here. We have an India based grievance officer. 

If someone reports certain content, how soon can you take it down?

Very soon. We have the task force looking at all that and the reason we reached out to the EC was exactly because of that. If someone flags some content to us, we take it down in a very reasonable time. We don’t overly take down content, we only take it down if it violates our community guidelines.

How will you ensure the 48 hour no advertising guidelines are ensured on TikTok in different regions?

It is a real challenge and the EC has recognised it. If you look at the code of conduct (formulated by IAMAI) doesn’t involve that particular challenge because the EC and platforms recognise that it is extremely difficult. 

Have you asked any Indian institution or the EC to join your platform?

These are all public institutions. The EC is a good example because they are a neutral body and I am actually going to ask them to check out our platform this week. However, we are not doing proactive outreach to the government institutions or parties. They are really not our focus. They can use our platform as any other user.