Fahmi said based on his meeting with TikTok Malaysia yesterday, the company still has a high number of workers in the country at around 3,700 people, with the layoffs involving 481 workers here.

“In fact, TikTok will open several new positions and increase the number of employees because it will provide several new services, including cloud computing and data centres.

“TikTok says it has a moderation team wherever it operates. The number of employees in this department has been reduced, but this will not have any negative impact on their operations in Malaysia or affect their cooperation with the police and Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission.”

Fahmi said this when met by reporters at a function held at PPR Kerinchi here today.

Fahmi said TikTok had decided on the layoffs due to the widespread use of artificial intelligence to screen and moderate its content.

“The employees left are those doing manual moderation. Here we see in general how artificial intelligence affects duties that may be repetitive and manual,” he said.

Fahmi, however, also asked TikTok to manually add moderators for content or live sessions in Chinese and Tamil, especially in the middle of the night.

“They are in the process of increasing the number of manual moderators. I also asked them to improve the content monitoring protocol, especially for live sessions in the middle of the night,” he said.