"Dutch ministry to investigate best practice for online platform content moderation," 20 November 2024

The Dutch interior ministry is conducting a study to discover the best methods for content moderation on very large online platforms and search engines, in the wake of redundancies by video sharing app TikTok in the Netherlands... The results of the study will be available in the autumn of 2025 and will also be shared with the European Commission... Szabó said that the ministry was in touch with TikTok in the Netherlands to address the cancelling of its Dutch Trust and Safety office in Amsterdam with some 300 employees...

He added that the company promised that the layoffs "will not affect the total number of moderators in the EU" and that there "will be no major changes" to the number of moderators by language group, and that it has no plans to significantly reduce the number of human content moderators...

According to TikTok's last Digital Services Act (DSA) transparency report, the company has some 160 content moderators in charge of Dutch language. These employees are not necessarily based in the Netherlands but can also work on content from other offices. A spokesperson for the video sharing app told Euronews that the company has "over 6,000 people supporting EU content moderation and these changes [the closing of the Dutch Trust and Safety operations] will not reduce this overall number." TikTok's content moderation is done automatically by default, and in case the system detects a violation, human moderation can help improve the platform’s machine learning tools by providing feedback as well as giving additional context and nuance, the company said in its DSA report...The company claims to have “language capabilities covering at least one official language for each of the 27 European Union Member States, consistent with previous reporting periods".