Community Guidelines Enforcement Report
January 1, 2020 – June 30, 2020
Released: September 22, 2020
About this report
Hundreds of millions of people around the world come to TikTok for entertainment, self-expression, and connection. We have no higher priority than helping promote a safe app experience that fosters joy and belonging among our growing global community. We can’t do that without transparency.
TikTok is striving to be the most transparent and accountable company in the industry when it comes to how we are keeping our users safe. We have put actions behind our words by making our content moderation, algorithms, and privacy and security practices available at our global Transparency and Accountability Centres. We publish these Transparency Reports to provide insight into the volume and nature of content removed for violating our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. We also recap the improvements we have made over the first half of 2020 to enhance safety and promote positivity on our platform.
Latest data
Videos
In the first half of 2020 (January 1 – June 30), 104,543,719 videos were removed globally for violating our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, which is less than 1% of all videos uploaded on TikTok. Of those videos, we found and removed 96.4% of videos before a user reported them, and 90.3% were removed before they received any views. This chart shows the volume of videos removed by policy violation. When a video violates our Community Guidelines, it’s labeled with the policy or policies it violates and is removed. This means the same video may be counted in multiple policy categories.
As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, we relied more heavily on technology to detect and automatically remove violating content in markets such as India, Brazil, and Pakistan. Of the total videos removed, 10,698,297 were flagged and removed automatically for violating our Community Guidelines. Those videos are not reflected in the chart above.
This chart shows the five countries/markets with the largest volumes of removed videos.
Country/Market | Total removals |
India | 37,682,924 |
United States | 9,822,996 |
Pakistan | 6,454,384 |
Brazil | 5,525,783 |
United Kingdom | 2,949,620 |
Overview
We made important strides during the first half of 2020 to establish a number of policies, products, and partnerships designed to promote safety, accountability, and positivity in the app.
Policies
We started 2020 by releasing an expanded set of policies in our Community Guidelines to promote an uplifting and welcoming app environment. This included new policies on misleading content to prevent the spread of misinformation and disinformation as well as more nuanced policies in areas like hate speech to foster inclusion. We also made public commitments to promote and support the Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse and the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.
Products
Promoting our policies
To support our policies, we introduced a way for users to easily report different kinds of misinformation directly to our team for review. We launched a fact-checking program across eight markets to help us verify misleading content, such as misinformation about the novel coronavirus, elections, and climate change. We also introduced in-app educational PSAs on hashtags related to important topics in the public discourse, such as the elections, Black Lives Matter, and harmful conspiracies, including QAnon.
Connecting users to authoritative and educational content
We continued our work to educate users about our policies and safety features through in-app safety videos. To promote digital literacy, we launched a Youth Portal where teens and their families can learn about internet safety and the tools and controls built into TikTok. We also created TikTok-style videos with popular creators to educate our community about media literacy and misinformation.
We prioritized building experiences that connect our users to authoritative and supportive content across a range of topics. When the novel coronavirus emerged, we promoted authoritative content through in-app informational pages and hosted educational livestreams and hashtag challenges with the World Health Organization, the International Federation of Red Cross, UNICEF India, and popular voices for public health and science, including Bill Nye the Science Guy and Prince’s Trust. To support our Black community, we developed dedicated pages in our app where users could learn about Black history and social justice organizations while celebrating Black creators and artists during Black Music Month.
Enhancing youth safety
TikTok launched a suite of industry-leading youth safety features that allow parents and teens to customize their TikTok experience based on individual needs. Through our Family Pairing feature, parents are able to connect their TikTok account to their teens’ to guide the type of content available to their teen, promote healthy screentime habits, and decide message settings. TikTok automatically disables direct messaging for registered accounts under the age of 16, and we don’t allow any user to send private images as a preventative measure against harmful and abusive content.
Partnerships
We value feedback and input from experts, non-profits, and others, because it makes our policies, products, and safeguards stronger and more comprehensive for our community. Over the first half of 2020, TikTok formed a number of important global partnerships with leading safety organizations. This includes a significant partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and WePROTECT Global Alliance to do our part to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse material. In India, we partnered with the Data Security Council of India to increase awareness for safe practices online. And in the US, we launched our Content Advisory Council of experts on hate speech, inclusive AI, youth safety, and more as well as our Creator Diversity Collective which brings people from different backgrounds together to help ensure diversity, inclusion, and representation in our programs and on our platform.