TikTok removed more than 80 million videos from the platform between April and June this year for breaking its content rules, the social media giant has said.
As part of the firm’s latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, TikTok said the figure represented less than 1 per cent of the total videos uploaded to the site in that time.
In total, TikTok said 81,518,334 videos were removed globally during the three-month reporting period, with 94.1 per cent of those removed posts being taken down before a user reported them.
The company said 87.5 per cent of the removed content also had not been viewed by anyone — up from 81.8 per cent in the previous report.
Cormac Keenan, TikTok’s head of trust and safety, said the platform was making “steady progress” in its proactive detection of “hateful behaviour” and other content.
“For example, 73.3% of harassment and bullying videos were removed before any reports compared to 66.2% in the first quarter this year, while 72.9% of hateful behaviour videos were removed before any reports compared to 67.3% from January – March,” he said.
“This progress is attributable to ongoing improvements to our systems that proactively flag hate symbols, words, and other abuse signals for further review by our safety teams.”
He added that the firm was also working on its efforts to improve its ability to better identify the context of behaviour flagged in videos.
“Harassment as a whole, and hate speech, in particular, are highly nuanced and contextual issues that can be challenging to detect and moderate correctly every time,” he said.
“For instance, reappropriation of a term is not a violation of our policies, but using that reappropriated term to attack or abuse another person would violate our hateful behaviour policy.
“Bullying can be highly personal and require offline context that isn’t always available.
“To better enforce our policies, we regularly train and guide our team on how to differentiate between, for instance, reappropriation and slurs or satire and bullying. We’ve also hired policy experts in civil rights, equity, and inclusion.
“As we make continual improvements to our detection mechanisms, we are striving to get these critical issues right for our community. We encourage people to report accounts or content that may be in violation our community guidelines.”
Alongside the report, TikTok announced an anti-bullying update for the site, which will add a mute feature for comments and questions during livestreams.
It will allow hosts or a trusted helper to temporarily mute individual viewers for a short period or the duration of the stream, removing that account’s comment history at the same time.
It is the latest in a string of safety updates introduced to TikTok in recent months, as social media continues to come under intense scrutiny over its handling of harmful content and protection of users.
