By: Helena Lersch, Director of Public Policy, SEA and MENAT

TikTok is a diverse, global community fueled by creative expression. We work to maintain an environment where everyone feels safe to create, find community, and be entertained. We are committed to being transparent about how we keep our platform safe, because it helps build trust and understanding with our community. And now we've taken another step to be accountable to this commitment by releasing our fourth global Transparency Report.

This Transparency Report covers the second half of 2020 (July 1 - December 31) and provides visibility into the volume and nature of content removed for violating our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, with additional insight into our work to counter misinformation related to COVID-19 and elections. It also includes how we respond to law enforcement requests for information, government requests for content removals, and intellectual property removal requests.

We've added a number of new data to this report in our effort to be ever more transparent, including:

  • Accounts removed
  • Spam accounts and videos removed
  • Videos restored after they were appealed by the video's creator
  • Specific policy insights
  • Ads rejected for violating our advertising policies

Here are some of the key insights from the report, which you can read in full here.

Community Guidelines enforcement overview

  • 89,132,938 videos were removed globally in the second half of 2020 for violating our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, which is less than 1% of all videos uploaded on TikTok.
  • 92.4% of these videos were removed before a user reported them, 83.3% were removed before they received any views, and 93.5% were removed within 24 hours of being posted.
  • 6,144,040 accounts were removed for violating our Community Guidelines.
  • 9,499,881 spam accounts were removed along with 5,225,800 spam videos posted by those accounts. We prevented 173,246,894 accounts from being created through automated means.
  • 3,501,477 ads were rejected for violating advertising policies and guidelines.

Countering COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation

TikTok continues to work with public health experts to help our community stay safe and informed on COVID-19 and vaccines. We make public health information available throughout our app as we also work to counter misinformation. Here are some results from these efforts during the second half of 2020:

  • Our COVID-19 information hub was viewed 2,625,049,193 times.
  • Banners directing viewers to the COVID-19 information hub were added to 3,065,213 videos.
  • Public service announcements (PSAs) on hashtags directing users to the WHO and local public health resources were viewed 38,010,670,666 times.
  • 51,505 videos were removed for promoting COVID-19 misinformation. Of these videos, 86% were removed before they were reported to us, 87% were removed within 24 hours of being uploaded to TikTok, and 71% had zero views.

This is our most comprehensive report to-date, and we're proud of the progress we've made to increase transparency into our content and moderation practices. We'll continue to listen to feedback from our community and share our progress as we work to earn the trust of our community.