Our content moderation principles and practices are informed by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Santa Clara Principles, and we seek to align with international legal frameworks, such as the International Bill of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of Children. We recognize that sometimes these principles may be in tension with each other, and we make trade-offs carefully.

1. Prevent harm: Our primary focus is keeping our community safe, fostering inclusivity, and ensuring TikTok is a place for joy. We consider the many ways that content or behaviors may cause harm to individuals or our diverse community. This includes physical, psychological, financial, privacy, and societal harms. To strike the right balance with free expression, we restrict content only when necessary and in a way that seeks to minimize the impact on speech.
2. Enable free expression: The creativity unlocked by expression is what powers our vibrant community. We honor this human right by providing the opportunity to share freely on our platform and by proactively removing harassing behavior that can inhibit creator speech. However, free expression is not an absolute right – it is always considered in proportion to its potential harm. It also does not extend to a right to have your content amplified in the For You feed.
3. Foster civility: Civility creates respect between people and helps communities thrive. The way we engage with each other online can sometimes threaten positive interactions with others, so being civil on TikTok is critical to fulfilling our mission. This means acknowledging everyone’s inherent dignity and conducting ourselves as if we were face-to-face. To ensure space for free expression, we do allow more latitude for social critique of public figures.
4. Respect local context: TikTok brings together over a billion people across 150+ countries in one shared digital space. We work with regional experts and local communities to help ensure that our global approach recognizes local cultural norms. We adopt regional applications of our guidelines to ensure we do not impose one region’s values on another, while also embracing a baseline of internationally recognized human rights.
5. Champion inclusion: We want people from around the world to feel welcome on our platform. We value and celebrate different cultures, identities, appearances, viewpoints, interests, and experiences. We know some communities historically have been afforded fewer opportunities for engagement, so we are committed to the human right of equal protection, equity, and mitigating harms that disproportionately affect marginalized or underrepresented groups.
6. Protect individual privacy: The right to privacy provides people a sense of autonomy, comfort, and security. We are committed to protecting and respecting the privacy of our community. We seek to ensure that content shared on the platform does not expose anyone’s personal information or invade their intimate privacy.
7. Provide transparency and consistency: Our community members have a right to know what our rules are and how we apply them. We seek to provide clear notice of our policies and practices, to apply them consistently and equitably, and to share our enforcement efforts in our Transparency Center. We will be transparent throughout the guidelines when we need to prioritize another principle over consistency, such as local context or inclusion.
8. Be fair and just: Moderating millions of pieces of content each day is a complex effort, and developing a trusted process to do so is critical. We are committed to being impartial and evidence-based, producing fair outcomes, giving notice of enforcement actions, and providing an opportunity to appeal content removals, LIVE suspensions, and account bans.