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1-Rider Party-list Rep. Rodge Gutierrez is prodding social media giant TikTok to implement proactive measures to curb disinformation or misleading content on its platform.

This, after the House assistant minority leader called out TikTok for its failure to check the spread of posts that asserted China's alleged owernship of Palawan island in the Philippines.

In the recent House tri-committee (tri-comm) hearing on fake news and disinformation, Gutierrez noted that TikTok’s response to fake news remains largely reactionary, only acting when harmful content is flagged rather than taking preventive measures to detect and stop disinformation before it reaches a wide audience.

“Mr. Chair, most respectfully, while we laud the attempts at the measures being taken by TikTok in relation to this and we appreciate the numbers that are being put forward – one issue that we have really is that anecdotally that doesn’t seem to be the case,” Gutierrez said.

The lawyer-legislator noted that once flagged content is removed, the same video can easily be reposted by a different account. 

“For example when we talk about fake news in relation to China, when we see one video posted and it has been reported, we would see the same video posted by a different person,” he said.

“So that’s why I wanted to ask if – how do we ensure that a video that has been flagged for disinformation is not posted again?” Gutierrez added.

During the hearing, TikTok’s public policy manager, Peachy Paderna, assured lawmakers that the platform does not allow misinformation that could cause harm. 

“We do not allow misinformation that causes harm, including disinformation that could lead to individual or community harm,” she said.

Paderna reported that “Between July to September, I believe during a period last year, we removed over four million videos that violated our community guidelines. 99.5 percent of those videos were taken down proactively and of the remaining percentage, 98 percent was taken down in less than 24 hours after being reported by users.”

Gutierrez, however, was not convinced, and told Paderna that TikTok’s efforts have fallen short in effectively stopping falsehoods from going viral. 

“It tends to be that once there is a narrative being taken by certain bad actors in relation to fake news and it’s posted and they take it down, they just post it through another user,” he said.