Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and
College Leaders (ASCL), and Paul Whiteman, General Secretary of
the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), met with
representatives of the social media platform TikTok today. This
meeting followed a recent spate of posts on TikTok containing
imagery and comments that are extremely offensive to school staff
and have caused huge distress.
In a joint statement, Mr Barton and Mr Whiteman said:
“We met with TikTok today and were pleased to have a constructive
discussion focused on finding both immediate and long-term
solutions to addressing the horrendous abuse of teachers that has
featured in posts on the platform over the past two weeks.
“We have been assured that TikTok has a large team working on
this issue, that it has taken down hundreds of pieces of content,
and that it has banned accounts and hashtags associated with this
trend. TikTok has also offered to provide communications to our
members to help in terms of reporting abusive content and we will
be circulating this guidance via our newsletters in due course.
“The problem with all of this is that there appears to be a
mismatch between the action being taken by TikTok and what we are
hearing from members. School leaders continue to tell us of posts
on TikTok which target staff with highly offensive and defamatory
material, and a number say TikTok has either not responded to
requests to remove this content, or has decided there is no
violation of community guidelines, which we find impossible to
understand.
“We can only hope that the situation improves and that the action
being taken by TikTok proves effective in tackling this appalling
trend. We will be monitoring the feedback we receive from school
leaders.
“In the longer term, we have spoken to TikTok about the need for
a better system to address this sort of problem if anything
similar happens again in the future, and we have suggested that
this might be done by the creation of an education portal which
is staffed by a dedicated education team that schools can
contact.
“We understand this is not something that can be set up
overnight, but the experience of the past two weeks illustrates
the need to make the platform far more effective in rapidly
dealing with any issues of this nature.”
