By Christine Grahn, Head of Public Policy & Government Relations - Europe

  • Over 175m people across Europe now come to TikTok every month
  • We're making significant progress on Project Clover, with data migration underway at our Norway data centre, and the independent cybersecurity company NCC Group now monitoring our controls and access to European user data

Today, we are announcing for the first time that over 175m people across Europe now come to TikTok every month* to discover content, find community, learn something new or just be entertained.

Keeping our community safe is our priority and by the end of 2024, we will have invested nearly €2bn globally in these efforts this year alone. At our European Safety Forum this week in our newly opened Dublin Transparency & Accountability Centre, we welcomed media and external experts, and announced how we are rolling out new product updates, partnering with external experts and engaging in cross-industry dialogue to further strengthen the safety and security of our community, and their data.

Partnering with industry and civil society to build consensus on age assurance

People must be 13 or older to use TikTok and we proactively enforce this by methods including:

  • Having a neutral age gate; we don't hint or nudge towards the 'right' age
  • Placing restrictions on people’s ability to create another account with a different date of birth if they fail our age check
  • Using technology to detect accounts that we suspect belong to someone under 13 and send them to moderation for review
  • Training specialist moderators to review suspected underage accounts

Every month, we remove around 6 million accounts globally because we believe that our minimum age requirement has not been met.

Age assurance continues to be one of the most complex policy areas that online platforms, policymakers and regulators continue to grapple with. Earlier this year, we partnered with WeProtect Global Alliance, Centre for Information Policy Leadership, Praesidio Safeguarding, and industry peers to launch a new initiative aimed at bringing together online platforms, regulators, policymakers, privacy and child rights organisations among others, to discuss industry-wide approaches to age assurance that help to make the online world safer for young people while also respecting their fundamental rights.

At the same time, we are exploring how new machine learning technology can enhance our efforts to prevent people under 13 from being on our platform. This technology will help detect accounts that may belong to someone under 13 so that a specially trained moderator can review the account and remove it if they believe someone doesn't meet our minimum age. Like today, people will be able to appeal if they think we've made a mistake.




Making changes to effects in response to teens' feedback

We regularly partner with external experts to identify how we can make further improvements for our community.

To this end, we recently commissioned multi-market research** with the UK not-for-profit organisation Internet Matters examining the role of online platforms in shaping teens' identity and relationships. The final report, "Unfiltered: The Role of Authenticity, Belonging and Connection", published today, told us that young people and parents saw benefit in being authentic online, and recognised the positive impact of belonging and connection online. They thought these traits could have a helpful influence on young people's broader well-being.

The report also identified new insights about teens' use of effects and the impact this has on their sense of self. A clear distinction was drawn between effects designed to be obvious and funny (e.g. animal ear effects) and effects designed to alter your appearance. Specifically, teens and parents raised concerns about 'appearance' effects, including that those viewing the content might not realise it had been altered.

In response to these insights, we are rolling out the following changes globally to effects in the coming weeks:

  • Age restricted effects: restricting the use of some appearance effects for teens under 18
  • More information: we will be providing more information about how an effect might change their appearance if applied. This is in addition to already proactively letting users know when certain effects have been used on content
  • Creator guidance: refreshing our resources for people developing effects for TikTok Effects House to enhance awareness and understanding of some of the unintended outcomes that certain effects may pose

By fostering a culture of authenticity, respect and support, we can create a digital world where everyone feels empowered to be their true self.

Delivering on our €12bn data security investment

We are continuing the implementation of Project Clover, our industry-leading data security programme, which provides additional protection for our European users, including independent third party oversight by cyber security experts, NCC Group.

We have recently reached two significant milestones in the implementation: firstly, our European data centre in Norway is now operational and migration of European TikTok user data to it has begun. This means that our dedicated European enclave, where European user data is now stored by default, is now hosted on servers in the US, Ireland and Norway.

Secondly, NCC Group has begun continuous monitoring of the security gateway environments. These are additional security barriers that control access to data in our European enclave and are designed to enforce technical protocols that only permit approved employee access to certain data types.

From artists to businesses to creators and everyday users, TikTok has become part of the culture and fabric of everyday life in Europe. We are striving to set new standards in safety and security to ensure TikTok remains a platform that brings people together, entertains, informs and creates opportunity for our European community for many more years to come.


*This number refers to our Monthly Active Recipients and the methodology used to calculate this figure is the same as the methodology applied for our MAR calculation figure under our DSA reporting obligations. There are 32 countries in scope for this figure: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

** European markets included in research: Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK.