81,518,334 Videos Removed From TikTok in Q2 2021, or Fewer Than 1% of Uploads

TikTok removed 81,518,334 videos from its platform during the second quarter of 2021 for violations of its community guidelines or terms of service, representing fewer than 1% of all videos uploaded. The company said in its Q2 Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, released Wednesday, that 93% of those videos were identified and removed within 24 hours of being posted, 94.1% before being reported by a member of the TikTok community and 87.5% of them before they tallied a single view. That last figure is up from 81.8% in the first quarter. The five markets with the largest volume of removed videos were the U.S. (11,431,198), Pakistan (9,851,404), Brazil (7,488,608), Russia (4,759,623) and Indonesia (4,743,066). TikTok called out some other gains compared with enforcement actions in the first quarter of 2021, saying that 73.3% of harassment and bullying videos were removed before any reports, compared with 66.2%, while those figures were 72.9% and 67.3%, respectively, for hateful behavior. The company said 4,663,387 videos were reinstated during the second quarter after their removals were appealed by their creators. TikTok removed 14,871,412 accounts during the period for violating its community standards, including 11,205,597 suspected underage accounts that potentially belonged to people younger than 13. The total represents less than 1% of all accounts on the platform. The company said it stopped 148,759,987 fake accounts from being created during the second quarter, removed 8,542,037 videos posted by spam accounts, identified and prevented 632,416,873 attempted follow requests by fake accounts, removed 71,935,583 fake accounts that followed other users and prevented 9,612,942,242 attempted likes and corrected 91,812,066 inauthentic likes by those accounts. The platform also rejected 1,829,219 ads for violating advertising policies and guidelines during the quarter. TikTok began rolling out a new safety feature Wednesday, letting hosts or trusted helpers mute viewers of livestreams for unkind comments. They can choose to do so for a few seconds or minutes, or for the entire video. If someone’s account is muted for any amount of time, their entire comment history will be removed. TikTok head of U.S. safety Eric Han said in a blog post Wednesday, “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. 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 behavior policy. Bullying can be highly personal and require offline context that isn't always available.” He continued, “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 rolled out unconscious bias training for our moderators and 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.”