TikTok removes over 85 million videos in violation of community guidelines last quarter

• Latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report highlights strides made in maintaining the platform as a safe and welcoming space
• 94.1% of videos were removed within 24 hours of being posted for violating Community Guidelines, 95.2% were removed before a user reported them, and 90.1% were removed before the videos had any views

The world’s leading short-form video platform, TikTok, has released its latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report for Q4 2021 (Oct-Dec 2021), including updates on its commitment to support the safety of the community and foster kindness on the platform.

The report reflects the platform’s ongoing commitment to earn trust by being accountable to users while working to be a safe and welcoming space. Efforts include fostering authentic engagement across the comment space, having safety reminders for creators, and adhering strictly to the platform’s extensive Community Guidelines.

Starting from this latest report, the platform will provide information about content removals and ongoing improvements to systems when detecting, flagging, and removing violative content. In the fourth quarter of 2021, 85,794,222 videos were removed globally, which represents about 1% of all videos uploaded to TikTok. Nearly 94.1% of videos were removed within 24 hours of being posted for violating Community Guidelines, 95.2% were removed before a user reported them, and 90.1% were removed before the videos had any views.

These developments have helped improve the speed of tackling harassment and other negative behaviours. To date, the removal of content that violates Community Guidelines, prior to receiving any views, improved by 14.7% for harassment and bullying, 10.9% for hateful behaviour, 16.2% for violent extremism, and 7.7% for dangerous acts.

A TikTok official said: “At TikTok, we believe our community should be built on a foundation of respect, kindness, and understanding. To help people forge positive digital connections in line with our rules for appropriate behaviour, we strive to empower our users to stay in control of their interactions with others on TikTok. There’s no finish line when it comes to keeping people safe, and our latest report and continued safety improvements reflect our ongoing commitment to the well-being of our community.”

Alongside the platform’s work to proactively remove abusive and hateful content or behaviour that violates Community Guidelines, it is exploring new ways to help everyone feel more in control over comments through authentic engagement. This includes testing ways in which users can identify comments they believe to be irrelevant or inappropriate, such as through disliking comments. 

The community feedback collated will add to the range of factors already in use to help keep the comment section consistently relevant and a place for genuine engagement. In addition to this, to avoid demoralising creators, only the person who registered a dislike on a comment will be able to see that they have done so.

To further streamline its built-in safety tools, TikTok is experimenting with safety reminders that will guide creators on using comment filtering, bulk block, and delete options. The reminders will be displayed to creators whose videos appear to be receiving a high proportion of negative comments. Parallelly, the platform will continue to remove comments that violate its stringent Community Guidelines, building on existing tools such as the ability to filter comments on content, delete comments, and report multiple comments at once.