A teenager from Bijeljina who threatened Bosniak neighbors in TikTok videos says he regrets his posts, but experts note that his case highlights deeper problems in combating hate speech on social media.
The father of a minor who has been posting offensive videos on the TikTok social network for the past few days confirmed that he himself reported his son to the police and that both of them regret the posts.
His son, who is a minor and whose full identity is therefore not published, recorded and shared videos on his profile “Serbia to the Serbs” (Srbija Srbima) with verses that insult Islam and Muslims and call for a “reduction” of their number and a kind of expulsion from the area where Serbs live.
The minor’s father says that his son thinks he made a mistake and wants to make it right somehow. He added that he is not a nationalist and that he is not familiar with who persuaded him to publish such content.
The Bijeljina Police Department confirmed that they have identified a minor who they observed insulting citizens of Bosniak nationality via the social network TikTok, and that a report against this person has been submitted to the District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Bijeljina.
“That it be prevented and forgotten and that it never happens again, of course I, as his father, want that,” he says.
A recent analysis by the Srebrenica Memorial Center showed that genocide denial is rarely removed from TikTok, and experts interviewed by Detektor say that the network does not pay enough attention to removing content that can spread hatred or glorify crimes.
”Content about crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) does not have a good enough filter,” it was warned in a recent analysis of the Srebrenica Memorial Center. Tarik Mocevic, project coordinator at the Sarajevo Media Center and co-author of the report on the denial of crimes on TikTok, points out the data from the Center for Combating Hate in the Digital Space, that the social networks Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok did not react to 84 percent of posts that should be categorized as spreading hatred.
“TikTok, like other social networks, in principle does not allow the sharing of content that expresses hate speech, denies genocide or glorifies criminal organizations,” says Mocevic and adds that TikTok’s guidelines for removing content do not acceptdiscrimination and that they are removed by default through the self-regulation system based on keywords.
“It is obvious, however, as shown by our analysis and the last example, that this system is not efficient enough,” stated Mocevic, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
