A senior Meta researcher, Matt Motyl, said the company's competitor to TikTok, Instagram Reels, was launched in 2020 without sufficient safeguards. The algorithms are a "black box" whose internal workings are difficult to scrutinise, said Ruofan Ding, who worked as a machine-learning engineer building TikTok's recommendation engine from 2020 until 2024. Over a period of several months during 2025, the BBC regularly spoke to a member of the trust and safety team at TikTok, who we are calling Nick. In one example, a political figure who had been mocked by being compared to a chicken was prioritised over a 17-year-old who reported being the victim of cyber bullying and impersonation in France and a 16-year-old in Iraq who complained that sexualised images purporting to be of her were being shared on the app. In 2020, the algorithm arms race intensified when Reels was launched as part of Instagram, in response to TikTok taking the world by storm during the Covid pandemic. Matt Motyl - who worked as a senior researcher at Facebook and its successor company Meta from 2021 - said this was the company's attempt to "mimic" the "unique product" TikTok had launched.