KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 28 — Social media giant TikTok today denied claims that its moderators can influence the content on its feed, which allegedly led to the surprising performance of Perikatan Nasional (PN) in the 15th general election.

Following accusations that its moderators are politically biased, its Head of Public Policy Hafizin Tajudin said its moderators neither have the power to influence nor the tools to influence content.

"Regarding the former employee who served as a content moderator, we want to clarify that our moderators do not have any authority or access to any forms of promotional tools for content.

"We have a robust quality assurance system in place to ensure that the political or personal opinions of our employees do not affect their work quality and ethics, including when performing content moderation tasks,” he said in a statement.

TikTok said it strongly denies the claims made in a video and a resulting comment made on social media that has since been reshared.

"We aim to provide community members with a diverse range of relevant and entertaining content. To achieve this, we do promote a small fraction of videos to help diversify the content experience and introduce celebrities and emerging creators to the TikTok community.

"However, we do not allow political ads on the platform,” he said.

Earlier today, Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil said the government will look into allegations online of moderator bias at TikTok.

In the video Hafizin was referring to, a speaker alleged that the PAS Gombak information chief had been a member of the moderation team at Bytedance Malaysia, the local arm of the Chinese firm that owned and operated TikTok.

The speaker cited a Forbes report asserting that moderators at TikTok could make content of their choosing go viral using an undisclosed moderation tool.

Today, Hafizin insisted that TikTok’s moderators could not influence the distribution of content across the platform.

"Regarding the former employee who served as a content moderator, we want to clarify that our moderators do not have any authority or access to any forms of promotional tools for content.

"We have a robust quality assurance system in place to ensure that the political or personal opinions of our employees do not affect their work quality and ethics, including when performing content moderation tasks.

"TikTok’s content moderation decisions are based on a set of clearly defined Community Guidelines and has layers of checks and balances including quality assurance and third-party fact checkers, to uphold safety and ensure fairness in moderation,” he added.