TikTok has released the global Transparency Report for the first six months of 2020. This report provides insight into content removed from TikTok for violating our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. It also shows how they responded to copyright content take-down requests, law enforcement, and government agencies.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world come to TikTok for entertainment, self-expression, and connection. Their higher priority is promoting a safe app experience that fosters joy and belonging among the growing global community. Recognizing the vitality of building trust by being transparent with the community, TikTok releases these reports to hold themselves accountable and provide insight into the actions taken to help keep TikTok safe for everyone.
Here’s what’s covered in the global H1 2020 Transparency Report:
Promoting safety and community on TikTok
The top priority is promoting a safe and uplifting app environment. Over the first six months of 2020, there were numerous improvements to offer a safe experience for people on the platform, including:
- Expanded Community Guidelines with new policies to counter misinformation and disinformation.
- Introduced fact-checking programs in nine markets, including the US, Canada, UK, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, India to help verify misleading content about the novel coronavirus, elections, and more. They are working to bring this program to additional markets.
- Added in-app educational PSAs on hashtags related to important topics in the public discourse, such as COVID-19, the elections, Black Lives Matter, and harmful conspiracies like QAnon.
- Launched Family Pairing, a suite of industry-leading youth safety features that enable parents 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.
- Built global partnerships with leading safety organizations, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and WePROTECT Global Alliance
TikTok continues to engage with experts on hate speech, inclusive AI, youth safety, and more
Global Community Guidelines enforcement
TikTok experienced incredible user growth in 2020 with more content being created than ever before. As more of our lives moved online, people increasingly found meaningful ways to connect with each other on the platform. As a result, content removals have also increased compared to the last report.
- 104,543,719 videos were removed globally for violating Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, which is less than 1% of all videos uploaded on TikTok.
- Of those videos, 96.4% were found and removed before they were reported, and 90.3% were removed before they received any views.
Legal requests
The volume of legal requests also increased as the community grew over the first half of this year.
- There were 1,768 requests for user information from 42 countries/markets.
- There were 135 requests from government agencies to restrict or remove content from 15 countries/markets.
- There were 10,625 copyrighted content take-down notices globally evaluated.
The report has the full details on how it is evaluated and complies with requests.
Commitment to transparency and accountability
TikTok is striving to be the most transparent and accountable company in the industry when it comes to how they are keeping their users safe. They are proud of the progress they’ve made to increase visibility in these areas, including how the algorithm operates as well as content moderation, and security practices, which they make available to experts and lawmakers at the global Transparency and Accountability Centers. They’re also working towards being able to report this information and the progress made on a quarterly basis to increase accountability to their community.
