We want everyone to feel safe and comfortable when they spend time on TikTok. We've always had strict policies prohibiting nudity, sexual activity, and sexually explicit content, including content that directs to adult websites or apps. Over 40,000 dedicated trust and safety professionals work to develop and enforce these policies and build processes and technologies to detect, remove or restrict violative content at scale.

We also have policies to make borderline or "suggestive" content ineligible for recommendation into TikTok For You feeds, and we're sharing some of the ongoing work underway to strengthen our enforcement of these policies. Our goal is to foster an appropriate experience for our community, and minors in particular.

Enforcing our policies on sexually suggestive content

To safeguard For You feeds, TikTok has policies around content categories that are not eligible for recommendation, including implied nudity, sensual content, and other content that is not suitable for all audiences over age 13. While technology is more advanced at detecting overt nudity, there will always be borderline content that is more challenging for our systems to identify. We continue to iterate on multiple approaches to enforce our policies in this area.

Innovating on our Content Levels: Earlier this year we began to introduce our Content Levels system, which is designed to prevent certain content with more mature or complex themes (such as content containing profanity, adult innuendo, or sexually suggestive content) from reaching audiences between ages 13-17 (teen accounts). This is similar to other forms of media and platforms that use content ratings standards, except we've taken additional steps to help prevent teen accounts from viewing more mature content. As we've identified content as sexually suggestive or explicit, we've prevented teen accounts from viewing over 1 million overtly sexually suggestive videos in the last 30 days alone.

Investing in automation: Over the last year we've been iterating on our machine learning models to improve their consistency and accuracy in detecting sexually explicit, suggestive, or borderline content. Our aim is to quickly identify and remove violative content from our platform and prevent borderline or suggestive content from being recommended to or searchable by teen accounts. We're making progress to reduce the prevalence of borderline or suggestive content recommendations overall, and are now launching the next iteration of our borderline suggestive model which we expect to improve detection of such content, therefore creating a more appropriate and comfortable experience for teen account holders.

Partnering across the industry: We recently partnered with StopNCII.org, joining forces with Meta and Bumble, to bolster efforts to stop the spread of non-consensual intimate imagery. Not only will this collaboration provide better support for victims, it will also help automatically prevent content identified through our partnership with StopNCII from being posted on our platform.

Empowering creators: We want to empower creators to direct their content to the most appropriate audience. That's why we rolled out audience controls as a way for creators to restrict their content to accounts over 18 in LIVE earlier this year. We've started to bring our audience controls feature to creators of short-form video and will expand the feature globally over the coming weeks. To be clear: our policies still fully apply to creators who use this feature, and we will remove content which contains nudity and other violations of our Community Guidelines. We regularly educate creators about our policies because it takes a village to create a space where everyone feels welcome and safe.

Our goal has always been to make sure our community, especially teens on our platform, have a safe, positive and joyful experience when they come to TikTok. We've already taken significant strides to help ensure their feeds are full of content that is appropriate for them, and these improvements mark an important next step to meet that goal.