Around 50 people gathered for a protest near the offices of TikTok Germany, among them some of the 150-strong "trust and safety" department in Berlin, who say management are threatening to fire them en masse.
Holding a banner reading "we trained your machines, pay us what we deserve", the protestors said TikTok had already overseen one round of layoffs last year and demanded it reverse plans to fully close the department.
The content moderators are tasked with keeping content such as hate speech, misinformation and pornography off the platform, which claimed more than 20 million users in Germany as of late 2023.
The row in Germany comes amid a global trend of social media companies reducing their use of human fact-checkers and turning to AI instead.
In October, TikTok -- which has 1.5 billion users worldwide and is a division of Chinese tech giant ByteDance -- announced hundreds of job losses worldwide as part of a shift to AI-assisted content moderation.
TikTok did not reply to an AFP request for comment.
The moderators at TikTok Germany are being supported by the union ver.di, who say that the company has refused to negotiate and that strike action is being prepared if this continues.
One of the moderators, 32-year-old Benjamin Karkowski, said that staff had been "shocked" when they learned of TikTok's current plans via a message from management.
Another one of the moderators, 36-year-old Sara Tegge, says that the artificial intelligence used by the company "cannot tell whether content discriminates against certain groups and it can't judge the danger of certain content".
She cited an example in which the AI flagged innocuous content about Berlin's annual LGBT+ pride as breaking TikTok's guidelines on political protests.
If the company moves ahead with its plans she "certainly fears" users may be exposed to greater danger.
Showing support at Thursday's demonstration was Werner Graf, leader of the Green party's lawmakers in Berlin's state assembly.
"These people have been fighting so that the the internet isn't permanently overwhelmed" with "fake news and hate speech", he said.
"We in the political arena must make clear that checking content... can't simply be left up to AI, we must legislate to make sure it's done by humans," he went on.
TikTok hit by fresh complaint over data access
Vienna (AFP) July 17, 2025 -
Online privacy campaigners filed fresh complaints against social media giant TikTok and two other Chinese-owned companies on Thursday, saying they had failed to comply with data access requests.
Prominent Austria-based privacy campaign group Noyb (None of Your Business) already filed complaints against the three and another three Chinese-owned companies in January, accusing them of "unlawfully" sending Europeans' personal data to China.
While Shein, Temu and Xiaomi provided the complainants with additional information, TikTok, AliExpress and WeChat "continued to violate" the EU's landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Noyb said.
Noyb said it filed the fresh complaints against TikTok with data protection authorities in Greece, against AliExpress in Belgium and against WeChat in the Netherlands to order them to fulfil the access requests and fine them.
"All three tech companies have failed to comply with access requests... This makes it impossible for European users to exercise their fundamental right to privacy, to find out how their personal data is being processed," Noyb said.
TikTok only provided part of the complainant's data "in an unstructured form that was impossible to understand", Noyb said.
TikTok did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.
Last week, Beijing denied asking firms to "illegally" collect and store users' personal information after an investigation was opened into its European operations.
TikTok was fined 530 million euros ($610 million) in May by Ireland's Data Protection Commission over sending personal data to China, although the Chinese social media giant had insisted this data was only accessed remotely.
Ireland's DPC is the lead regulator in the EU for TikTok as the company has its European headquarters in the country.
The social media giant has been in the crosshairs of Western governments for years over fears that personal data could be used by China for espionage or propaganda purposes.
Noyb has launched several legal cases against US technology giants such as Meta and Google, often prompting action from regulatory authorities over violations of the GDPR.
"Chinese apps are even worse than US providers," Noyb said on Thursday.
Noyb began working in 2018 with the advent of the GDPR.
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