On
September 28rd, we released our global Transparency Report for the first six
months of 2020. This report provides insight into content removed from TikTok for
violating our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. It also shows how we
responded to copyright content take-down requests, law enforcement, and
government agencies.
Hundreds of millions of
people around the world come to TikTok for entertainment, self-expression, and
connection. We have no higher priority than promoting a safe app experience
that fosters joy and belonging among our growing global community. We know how
vital it is to build trust by being transparent with our community. It's why we
regularly release these reports to hold ourselves accountable to our community
and provide insight into the actions we take to help keep TikTok safe for
everyone.
Here's what's covered in our
global H1 2020 Transparency Report:
Promoting
safety and community on TikTok
Our top priority is
promoting a safe and uplifting app environment. Over the first six months of
2020 we made numerous improvements in our continuous strive to offer a safe
experience for people on our platform.
●
We expanded Community Guidelines with new policies to
counter misinformation and disinformation.
●
We introduced fact-checking
programs in nine markets, including the US, Canada, UK, Australia, France,
Italy, Spain, Japan, India to help us verify misleading content about the novel
coronavirus, elections, and more. We are working to bring this program to
additional markets.
●
We added in-app educational
PSAs on hashtags related to important topics in the public discourse, such as
COVID-19, the elections, Black Lives Matter, and harmful conspiracies like
QAnon.
●
We
launched Family Pairing, a suite of industry-leading youth safety features that enable parents to connect
their TikTok account to their teens' to guide the type of content available to
their teen, promote healthy screentime habits, and decide message settings.
● We built global partnerships
with leading safety organizations, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
and WePROTECT Global Alliance
We continue to engage with
experts on hate speech, inclusive AI, youth safety, and more
Global
Community Guidelines enforcement
TikTok experienced incredible
user growth in 2020 with more content being created than ever before. As more
of our lives moved online, people increasingly found meaningful ways to connect
with each other on our platform. As a result, our content removals have also
increased compared to our last report.
●
104,543,719
videos were removed globally for violating our Community Guidelines or Terms of
Service, which is less than 1% of all videos uploaded on TikTok.
● Of those videos, we found
and removed 96.4% of videos before they were reported to us, and 90.3% were
removed before they received any views.
Legal
requests
The volume of legal requests
also increased as our community grew over the first half of this year.
●
We
received 1,768 requests for user information from 42 countries/markets.
●
We
received 135 requests from government agencies to restrict or remove content
from 15 countries/markets.
● We evaluated 10,625 copyrighted content
take-down notices globally.
Our report has the full
details on how we evaluate and comply with those requests.
Our
commitment to transparency and accountability
