The safety and well-being of our community is our priority - over 40,000 people around the world work every day to keep people on TikTok safe.

As part of our ongoing obligations under Europe's Digital Services Act (DSA), we are today publishing our first transparency report focused on how we moderate content specifically across EU27 countries.

TikTok has voluntarily published transparency reports since 2019, and we continue to help our community understand our rules and how we enforce them through more granular Community Guidelines, improved safety notifications, and information on our Safety Centre. This new report supplements the regular updates we have already been sharing on our Transparency Centre. It includes information on the approach we take across the EU, looking at the month of September 2023 as the first full month of DSA enforcement.

Key insights include:

  • Proactive removals: TikTok proactively removes the vast majority of illegal and other harmful content for violations of our Community Guidelines, Terms of Service, or advertising policies. Last month, we removed more than 4 million pieces of content and ads for such violations - this figure is seven times greater than the volume of violative content removed following a user report.
  • Illegal content reporting: as part of our compliance with the DSA, we rolled out a new additional reporting option for illegal content. During the first month, we received more than 35,000 illegal content reports corresponding to about 24,000 unique pieces of content. A small proportion (16.3%) of this content was found to violate local law and actioned accordingly.
  • Local investment: from the outset of establishing our operations in Europe, we have invested heavily in hiring locally and over 5,000 people across the region work on TikTok today. This approach also extends to our safety efforts. Our Global Head of Trust and Safety is based in Ireland, along with many other senior leaders with responsibility for our regional safety strategy, content policy development, enforcement function and engagement with third party experts (including academics, civil society groups and NGOs). We have thousands of content moderators providing extensive coverage, with dedicated resources for at least one official language of each EU Member State. We also have coverage for other commonly spoken languages across the region, such as Arabic and Turkish.

In addition to this DSA-specific transparency report, we published last month our second report under the European Commission's Code of Practice on Disinformation. This contained more than 2,600 data points from across EEA countries on how we're combatting the spread of harmful misinformation in the region. We also recently shared extensive information on how we are protecting our community during the Israel-Hamas war, including additional measures we have taken, such as adding more moderators who speak both Arabic and Hebrew to review content related to events.

These detailed and expansive reports show our continued commitment to being transparent about how we keep people on TikTok safe - and give the 134 million people across Europe who come to TikTok every month detailed information about both our efforts and their efficacy.

We will continue to provide regular updates on our work, both in Europe and around the world, so that our community can continue to focus on enjoying creative and entertaining TikTok experiences.