TikTok received over 500 government requests and removed 49 million videos in six months, according to the company’s latest transparency report.
Owned by China’s ByteDance, TikTok reported it had 500 requests from governments and law enforcement agencies in 26 countries. These all took place during the second half of 2019. This presented a 67% increase on the first half of the year, when it received 298.
India, considered as TikTok’s biggest market in terms of user numbers, processed 302 requests. TikTok shared data in 90% of those cases. The company's report revealed that the US made 100, and TikTok shared data in 82% of those cases. Moreover, Japan made 16, Germany had 15, Norway made 10, and the UK had 10.
“Any information request we receive is carefully reviewed for legal sufficiency to determine, for example, whether the requesting entity is authorized to gather evidence in connection with a law enforcement investigation or to investigate an emergency involving imminent harm,” TikTok said in the report.
Governments asked the app for the content be removed on 45 separate occasions, but TikTok did not respond to all of those. Most of the requests (30) came from India.
“If we believe that a report isn’t legally valid or doesn’t violate our standards, we may not action the content,” TikTok said.
Content violations
Due to content violations in just six months, over 49 million videos were removed by TikTok. This is less than 1% of all videos published on the platform.
There were 16.5 million videos removed from TikTok in India, where the app was banned last week. This is equivalent to four times more than any other country.
Meanwhile, the US recorded the second most videos removed with 4.6 million. It was followed by Pakistan with 3.7 million, the UK in fourth, and Russia in fifth.
The top reason for removal was “adult nudity and sexual activities.” This is the violation of one in four of the removed videos removed in December, TikTok's report shows.
Findings revealed that violence, alcohol and drug taking, self-harm or suicide are the other causes of content violation. Less than 1% of the deleted videos reflected hate speech and dangerous individuals and organizations.
Of the videos removed, the company reported that 89.4% were removed before they received any views. TikTok did not mention the number of videos removed by human moderators and those that were deleted by the company’s software.
According to its report, TikTok did not get any user information or content removal requests from China or Hong Kong. China was not also mentioned in the report at all. Analysts believe it is because ByteDance runs a clone of TikTok in China called Douyin. Government requests could be filed there instead.
TikTok is not accessible in China. and a spokesperson for the company was not available to determine whether requests to Douyin would be in a different report.
TikTok has launched “trust and safety hubs” in Dublin, Singapore and Mountain View, California, as part of an effort to provide a more local approach to content moderation.
Meanwhile, the US government plans to ban TikTok because it is deemed a security threat, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
