Chinese-owned social video-sharing app TikTok says that it has deleted more than 49 million videos which broke its rules, between July and December 2019. About a quarter of those videos were deleted for containing adult nudity or sexual activity, the business said, in its latest transparency report.
When a video violates our Community Guidelines, it’s labeled with the policy or policies it violates and is taken down. This means the same video may appear across multiple policy categories. For the month of December 2019, when our new content moderation infrastructure began to be in effect, we’re providing a breakdown of the policy category violations for videos removed under that new infrastructure.
Via TIKTOK TRANSPARENCY REPORT
During the month of December, 25.5% of the videos TikTok took down fell under the category of adult nudity and sexual activities. Out of an abundance of caution for child safety, 24.8% of videos TikTok removed violated their minor safety policies, which include content depicting harmful, dangerous, or illegal behavior by minors, like alcohol or drug use, as well as more serious content TikTok take immediate action to remove, terminate accounts, and report to NCMEC and law enforcement as appropriate.
Content containing illegal activities and regulated goods made up 21.5% of takedowns. In addition, 15.6% of videos removed violated their suicide, self-harm, and dangerous acts policy, which primarily reflects their removal of risky challenges. Of the remaining videos removed, 8.6% violated their violent and graphic content policy; 3% fell under their harassment and bullying policy; and less than 1% contained content that violated their policies on hate speech, integrity and authenticity, and dangerous individuals and organizations.
The chart below shows the 5 markets with the largest volumes of removed videos.
| Country/Market | Total Removal |
|---|---|
| India | 16,453,360 |
| United States | 4,576,888 |
| Pakistan | 3,728,162 |
| United Kingdom | 2,022,728 |
| Russia | 1,258,853 |
ByteDance, which has its headquarters in Beijing, bought a little lip-sync video platform called Musical.ly, which is based in Shanghai with offices in Santa Monica. In August 2018, Musical.ly was rebranded as TikTok, and then downloads of the app doubled worldwide.
