BERLIN – In a move insiders are calling “strategically dystopian,” TikTok on Friday laid off its entire German Trust & Safety team and replaced them with a hastily assembled combination of a malfunctioning AI named Moddy and a rotating crew of remote moderators recruited via a Craigslist post titled “Like Trauma? Work From Home!” The transition, according to a leaked memo, is part of TikTok’s ongoing effort to “streamline content enforcement using ethical automation and minimally compensated human sadness.”
The AI, reportedly running on a refurbished Pentium II desktop using Windows NT 4.0 and cooled by a desk fan propped up with a beer coaster, was originally developed in 1999 to sort spam emails and monitor Minesweeper tournaments. Now, it’s responsible for determining whether videos of street fights, conspiracy rants, or toe-licking challenges violate community guidelines. “Moddy is still learning,” said one ByteDance spokesperson, “but he’s already made great progress — yesterday he flagged an image of Angela Merkel eating soup as ‘violent extremism.’”
Meanwhile, the human moderators—some of whom thought they were signing up for a virtual escape room experience—have been trained via a 17-minute YouTube playlist and are paid in TikTok gift coins, promotional cheese wheels, and access to the company Slack channel titled #please_stop_tagging_us_in_these. “I clicked ‘inappropriate’ on a guy juggling ferrets with knives and the system promoted it to Trending,” said one anonymous contractor from Düsseldorf. “Then it demoted a grandma dancing to Abba because the AI detected ‘seduction.’ I no longer feel joy.”
TikTok defended the changes in a statement, claiming that “human oversight remains critical,” though sources confirm the oversight team is now just Moddy and a single intern named Sven who works out of a broom closet in Prague. Several watchdog groups expressed concern after discovering Moddy has never actually watched a full video, instead skimming every tenth frame and muttering binary curses when confronted with rapid movement. “The AI told me my cat video violated the Geneva Convention,” said one confused user. “And honestly? Fair.”
As content violations soar and #moddyiswatching trends across multiple platforms, company executives insist the system will improve “once Moddy is patched to recognize humans as sentient.” Until then, TikTok urges users to be mindful, respectful, and ready for anything, especially if they upload a video containing music, shadows, or faces. As of press time, Moddy has approved 14,000 videos of concrete drying, banned all footage of geese, and developed what experts describe as a “deep distrust of kettles.”
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