TikTok workers in Berlin are striking over plans to dismantle the company's entire trust and safety team in the German capital, replacing 150 employees with artificial intelligence and outsourced contract workers. The trade union ver.di, representing the workers, has called for negotiations over severance and a one-year notice period, but says TikTok has refused to engage.
Kalle Kunkel, a ver.di spokesperson, said the union sent a list of demands to TikTok, but the company declined to discuss them. “Basically, they said: ‘We don’t want to talk with you,’ so after that, we went on two strikes. But they still don’t react to us,” he said. The Berlin team covers the German-speaking market, which has about 32 million active users, and the layoffs would reduce the city's 400-strong workforce by nearly 40%.
TikTok spokesperson Anna Sopel said the layoffs are intended to “streamline workflows and improve efficiency,” adding that the company “remains fully committed to protecting the safety and integrity of our platform.” The trust and safety team is responsible for reviewing up to 1,000 videos per day for harmful content such as violence, pornography, misinformation and hate speech, often working alongside AI.
This is part of a global trend: TikTok has cut trust and safety staff in the Netherlands, Malaysia, and across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa over the past year. Other social media companies, including Meta, X and Snap, have also reduced human moderation in favour of AI. Aliya Bhatia of the Center for Democracy and Technology warned that replacing human moderators “is going to lead to more mistakes and more harmful experiences.”
Kunkel noted that TikTok's AI has misclassified content, such as flagging rainbow Pride flags as harmful, while missing actual violations. “AI is not able to really identify problematic pictures or videos, especially when it comes to sophisticated content,” he said. The layoffs come despite CEO Shou Zi Chew's 2024 pledge to increase trust and safety spending to over $2 billion with a team of more than 40,000 people globally.
