TikTok has just released its Q1 2021 Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, and it offers a glimpse of just how many accounts and videos the service is having to remove or block every month.
In total, TikTok removed or blocked the creation of over 82 million accounts during Jan-March this year. 71 million of those were blocked because they were “created through automated means.” The remaining 11 million or so accounts were removed for violating either the community guidelines or terms of service. However, the majority of those removals, some 7,263,952 accounts, were created by children.
TikTok detailed its work on designing an age-appropriate experience back in May and how it dealt with suspected underage accounts. As well as the age gate, TikTok explained, “we train our safety moderation team to be alert to signs that an account may be used by a child under the age of 13. We also use other information as provided by our users, such as keywords and in-app reports from our community, to help surface potential underage accounts.”
TikTok doesn’t allow a person under the age of 13 to open account, but clearly millions of children still attempt to, and succeed in doing so. Earlier this year the company made changes to the privacy on new and existing accounts for young teens (13-15) so they defaulted to private accounts. For anyone under the age of 13, there’s a limited app experience available called TikTok for Younger Users.
Alongside account removals, TikTok took down nearly 62 million videos for violating guidelines or terms of service. Clearly the service’s automated checks are working well as 82% of those videos were removed before anyone watched them, 91% were removed before a user reported them, and 93% were taken down within 24 hours. Finally, over 1.9 million ads were rejected for violating advertising policies and guidelines.
