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Community Guidelines Enforcement

Community Guidelines Enforcement Report

April 1, 2022 – June 30, 2022
Published September 28, 2022

About this report

TikTok is a global entertainment platform fueled by the creativity of our diverse community. We strive to foster a fun and inclusive environment where people can create, find community, and be entertained. To maintain that environment, we take action upon content and accounts that violate our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service and regularly publish information about these actions to hold ourselves accountable to our community.

TikTok uses a combination of innovative technology and people to identify, review, and action content that violates our policies. This report provides quarterly insights into the volume and nature of content and accounts removed from our platform.

Analysis

TikTok’s Community Guidelines are designed to foster an experience that prioritises safety, inclusion, and authenticity. Our policies apply to everyone and all content, and we strive to be consistent and equitable in our enforcement. This analysis provides additional context to supplement the data in this report.

Safety

TikTok uses a combination of people and technology to enforce our Community Guidelines and keep our community safe and welcoming. To do this effectively at scale, we continue to invest in technology-based flagging and moderation. We rely on automated moderation when our systems have a high degree of confidence that content is violative so that we can expeditiously remove violations of our policies. As a result, our overall protective detection efforts have continued to improve.

Leveraging machine learning has been especially impactful when it comes to our countering harmful misinformation. We expanded our capacity to iterate rapidly on our systems given the fast changing nature of misinformation, especially during a crisis or event (e.g. the war in Ukraine or an election). We also improved our ability to detect known misleading audio and imagery to reduce manipulated content on the platform. From these investments, this quarter we’re seeing gains in the right direction when it comes to enforcing our integrity and authenticity policies: proactive removal of videos improved from 83.6% in Q1 to 89.1% in Q2; removal of videos at zero views improved from 60.8% in Q1 to 74.7% in Q2; and video removals in under 24 hours improved from 71.9% to 83.9%.

Security

We continue to evolve and adapt our safeguards by investing in automated defenses to detect, block, and remove inauthentic accounts and engagement, and by improving our response speed and efficiency to evolving threats. In the second quarter of 2022, attacks on our systems resulted in an increase in the total volume of fake followers removed. We’ve implemented measures to hide enforcement actions from malicious actors, preventing them from gaining understanding of our detection capabilities. This led to decreases in spam accounts blocked at sign-up and increases in fake accounts removed.

Ads

TikTok has strict policies to protect users from fake, fraudulent, or misleading content, including ads. Advertiser accounts and ad content are held to these policies and must follow our Community Guidelines, Advertising Guidelines, and Terms of Service. In the second quarter of 2022, the total volume of ads removed for violating our advertising policies and guidelines decreased quarter to quarter. This is due in part to our efforts to strengthen account-level detection and enforcement strategies, which have helped improve the ads ecosystem and create better experiences for both users and advertisers. Our work to preserve the integrity of our ads ecosystem is never finished, and we will continue to review and further strengthen our systems to combat ads that violate our policies.

Latest data

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Total videos removed/total videos, by quarter

NOTE: Total videos removed represent about 1% of all videos uploaded to TikTok.

Total videos removed/restored, by type and quarter

NOTE: Restored videos are reflected in both the removal volumes and restore volumes in the above chart.

Total video removal, by policy

NOTE: This chart shows the volume of videos removed by policy violation. A video may violate multiple policies and each violation is reflected. In certain rare circumstances, such as emergency situations or hardware outages, we may not always capture the exact video violation category. These videos are not represented in the above chart but are accounted for in absolute numbers throughout this report.

Removal rate, by quarter/policy

NOTE: Proactive removal means identifying and removing a video before it’s reported. Removal within 24 hours means removing the video within 24 hours of it being posted on our platform.

Total video removal and rates, by sub-policy

NOTE: Only videos that have been reviewed by moderators are included in the sub-policy dashboard. Our minor safety policies aim to promote the highest standard of safety and well-being for teens. The “sexual activity involving minors” sub-policy prohibits a broad range of content, including “minors in minimal clothing” and “sexually explicit dancing”; these two categories represent the majority of content removed under that sub-policy. Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) is reported separately.

Removal volume and rates, by country

NOTE: This chart shows the thirty markets with the largest volumes of removed videos and represents approximately 80% of overall removal volume.

Total account removal, by quarter and reason

NOTE: In addition to removing accounts for our violating Community Guidelines, we remove accounts determined to be spam, along with spam videos posted by those accounts. We also take proactive measures to prevent spam accounts from being created through automated means.

Fake engagement

NOTE: We take action to both remove and prevent likes, followers, and follow requests when we deem the activity to come through automated or inauthentic mechanisms.

Spam account activity

NOTE: When we remove accounts for spam, we also remove videos created by those accounts under our spam policies.

Ads policy enforcement

NOTE: Due to a change in our approach to ad violation enforcement and a strengthening of our account-level enforcement capabilities, total ad removals increased in the first half of 2022. Ads may be removed either at the individual ad level or in bulk by taking action against an entire advertiser account.

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