TikTok releases latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report

TikTok has released its latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report for Q1 2022 (Jan -Mar) which provides insight into the volume and nature of violative content and accounts removed from TikTok.

In total, TikTok removed over 102 million videos in Q1 2022, with 'minor safety' being the top reason for content removals by a big margin. A large focus of this quarter's report was TikTok's response to the war in Ukraine. 

From February 24 through the end of the first quarter, March 31, 2022, TikTok took the following steps in response to the war in Ukraine:

• TikTok removed 41,191 videos, 87% of which violated its policies against harmful misinformation. The vast majority (78%) were identified proactively.
• Fact-checked 13,738 videos globally.
• Added prompts on 5,600 videos informing viewers that content could not be verified by fact checkers.
• Labelled content from 49 Russian state-controlled media accounts.
• Identified and removed 6 networks and 204 accounts globally for coordinated efforts to influence public opinion and mislead users about their identities.

Cormac Keenan, head of trust and safety, TikTok, said, "We release these quarterly reports to bring transparency to the actions we take to help keep TikTok safe, welcoming, and entertaining for our global community.

"This report has been expanded to bring ever-more transparency to our actions, progress, and challenges, and to stay accountable to our community. For instance, we now report the 30 markets with the largest volumes of removed videos which account for approximately 80% of overall video removal volume."

There are also new charts for spam account activity and fake engagement. In addition, TikTok now breaks down removals by sub-policy.

Additionally, In Q1 2022, TikTok removed almost 45 million accounts, the highest removals of accounts ever. Fake accounts and accounts suspected to be under the age of 13 were the top two reasons for removals.

The Q3 2021 report revealed that more than 91 million videos were removed from the platform during the period, or roughly 1% of all videos uploaded. In the Q1 2022 report, that figure reached over 100 million.