To colleagues across civil society working on tech workers’ rights, online safety, digital rights, child protection, disinformation and platform accountability, in Ireland, across Europe and internationally.

 

To politicians, policy-makers, and decision-makers in Ireland and across Europe – those who currently face a choice between an agenda of deregulation and the opportunity to protect workers and digital platform users.

 

We write on behalf of the trust and safety workers at TikTok’s Dublin headquarters, its European base, whose jobs are at risk of redundancy. We ask you to consider what would be lost, and to use the standing civil society holds under European law to respond.

 

 

As a Very Large Online Platform under the Digital Services Act, TikTok must assess and reduce systemic risks, including to minors, civic discourse and elections, and be transparent about how it moderates, including the languages its moderators cover. The European Commission has exclusive competence to enforce these systemic-risk duties on very large platforms; national Digital Services Coordinators supervise providers established in their territory, with Coimisiún na Meán holding this role in Ireland, TikTok’s country of establishment, and every member state having its own coordinator, acting together through the European Board for Digital Services. 

 

The company’s safety practices are already under formal investigation on several fronts: by the European Commission over its addictive design, its protection of minors and its handling of election risk, and by national authorities in Ireland, France and Spain over illegal content, child protection and the effect of its algorithm on young users. Every one of these cases turns on the work that teams of workers in Dublin teams perform. As Ireland’s Digital Services Commissioner has said, a regulator that wants to understand how a platform’s safety systems work must ask the Trust and Safety staff, not the public affairs staff. Those are the staff now being cut.

 

Our position is clear – when workers are negatively impacted that impact is felt by civil society organisations, governments, businesses, and users. This is an issue that will have ramifications across Europe.

 

 

On 1 July 2026, TikTok told staff at its Dublin operation, its largest in Europe, that it was proposing a significant restructuring. Around 667 roles have been placed at risk, Trust and Safety teams the most affected, in what the company calls a shift from legacy frontline tasks towards more specialised work delivered in part through new technology. A statutory consultation with the employee representatives is under way, with redundancies expected from August 2026.

 

Dublin office leads TikTok’s user safety strategy and enforcement for Europe, its moderation covers the wider EMEA region and Latin America, and it hosts the company’s international Transparency and Accountability Centre. Planned redundancies will reduce TikTok’s Irish workforce by 40 per cent, with a disproportionate impact on the Trust and Safety workforce. 

 

 

Dublin is where safety is designed, governed and enforced for much of the world, not only where videos are reviewed. The roles at risk include the policy specialists who write the rules on what is permitted; the market and language experts who understand local context, coded language and emerging harms in specific languages; the specialists who handle the gravest harms, from child sexual abuse material and grooming to violent extremism, self-harm and coordinated manipulation; and the staff who manage regulatory compliance and liaise with organisations like yours, trusted flaggers, hotlines and independent experts. Losing these experts weakens safety for users anywhere in the world, not only in Ireland or the EU.

 

Despite the company’s assurances, automation does not fill this gap. TikTok says automated tools now account for most content removals, but they do not write policy, judge cases that turn on context, or sustain relationships with regulators and civil society, and workers report the tools are not yet ready to do the job alone. Greater reliance on automation raises the need for skilled people to set the rules that those systems follow, check their errors and handle appeals. Research on the industry-wide contraction of these teams reaches the same conclusion: shrunken workforces cannot keep pace with those who abuse platforms.

 

 

We are deeply concerned that this decision, to substantially reduce the capacity of Trust and Safety functions, has been made without proper consideration of its impact on the rights of users. While TikTok has gone to great lengths to justify the role reductions, there is no indication that the company has carried out any form of human rights impact assessment to gauge the potential social and ethical consequences of this business decision. At a time when political extremes are gaining traction across Europe – often riding a wave of effective use of digital platforms, there has never been a more consequential time to take a lean approach to Trust and Safety. Each passing day this political extremism manifests itself in violent content directed at marginalised groups in society – migrants and LGBTQ+ people specifically.

 

Trust and safety workers and civil society are the bulwark against human rights violations in the digital space – our work is among the first lines against manifestations of violence in our streets and communities.

 

While TikTok and competitors, such as Meta, make the case that this work will be replaced by AI. What is more they are acting to replace this work with AI right now. Our platform owners, through the twin tool of automation and outsourcing, are weaking the vital human agency required to keep up with emerging trends in harmful and distressing content. By reducing the role played by Trust and Safety professionals, we remove the element of care and social motivation to protect users. AI-first approaches will, from our experience and that of Trust and Safety workers across the industry, result in worse outcomes from users in terms of exposure to harmful content and increase the capacity for malign political influence via digital platforms.

 

Ultimately, as in other industries across the world – the consequences for labour are consequences for society at large.

 

 

We write to you because you have levers we do not. Researchers among you can access platform data; bodies with relevant expertise can be certified as trusted flaggers by their national coordinator. Civil society helps scrutinise platforms’ risk assessments and can raise concerns with the Commission and national coordinators. You are, moreover, the people these teams work with, and you know what it means when the staff who answer your escalations and shape policy are gone.