Community Guidelines Enforcement Report

October 1, 2021 – December 31, 2021
Published April 13, 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.

Safety

We use a combination of technology and people to identify and remove violations of our Community Guidelines, and we continually invest in our policies, products, and partnerships to support the overall safety of our community and platform. In the fourth quarter of 2021, we continued to enhance our machine learning moderation techniques, which resulted in improvements to enforcement consistency and the accuracy of our automated removal systems. As a result of ongoing improvements to audio and speech recognition and detection, we meaningfully improved proactive detection and removals for violations of our suicide, self-harm, and dangerous acts policy, hateful behavior policy, and harassment and bullying policy. Additionally, ongoing optimisations of our minor safety detection models helped improve consistency in enforcement. The number of videos reinstated after being appealed decreased from the previous quarter, which we attribute to a reduction in false positives and an improvement in the accuracy of our detection and automated removals.

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 speed and response to evolving threats. In the fourth quarter of 2021, we developed additional monitoring systems and improved existing ticketing platforms and processes. This enhanced our ability to detect the creation of fraudulent user accounts at registration and remove fake followers, fake likes, and videos associated with those accounts.

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. Despite an overall increase in published ads on TikTok during the fourth quarter of 2021, the total volume of ads removed for violating our advertising policies and guidelines decreased. This is due in part to the efforts of multiple teams, whose work to improve our advertising ecosystem helps to create better experiences for both users and advertisers on our platform. We are committed to creating a safe and positive environment for our users, and we regularly review and further strengthen our systems to combat ads that violate our policies.

Latest data

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Total videos removed/restored, by type and quarter

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

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, a removed video’s violation category may not be captured. 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.

Removal by country

NOTE: This chart shows the ten markets with the largest volumes of removed videos.

Total account removal, by quarter and reason

NOTE: In addition to removing accounts for 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

Ads policy enforcement

Other reports

• Government Removal Requests
• Intellectual Property Removal Requests
• Information Requests