One of the most popular social media platforms, TikTok has removed nearly 7.3 million accounts from its platform. Accounting for less than 1% of its users, TikTok said that it removed accounts suspected of belonging to underage users.
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TikTok has published such figures for the first time in a Community Guidelines Enforcement Report. TikTok further stated that it hopes that the detail regarding underage users will “help the industry push forward when it comes to transparency and accountability around user safety.”
According to the report, 61,951,327 videos were removed, accounting to less than 1% of all videos uploaded due to violation of the app’s rules. 82% of these videos were removed before anyone could view them, 93% within 24 hours of being posted, and 91% before any user reported them.
In addition to this, 1,921,900 ads were rejected for violating advertising guidelines and policies, with 11,149,514 accounts being removed for violating the terms of service and guidelines.
TikTok has introduced various measures to protect teenagers on its platforms, including limiting features like live-streaming and private messaging to users aged 16 and above. Furthermore, users under the age of 16 will automatically have their accounts set to private.
“To bring more visibility to the actions we take to protect minors, in this report we added the number of accounts removed for potentially belonging to an under-age person,” Cormac Keenan, head of trust and safety at TikTok, said.
“In order to continue strengthening our approach to keeping TikTok a place for people 13 and over, we aim to explore new technologies to help with the industry-wide challenge of age assurance.”
