TAHIR AMIN

ISLAMABAD: The short-form video platform, TikTok, has removed more than 6.5 million violative videos from Pakistan.

TikTok released its latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report for Q4 2021 (Oct-Dec 2021), including updates on its commitment to support the safety of the community and foster kindness on the platform.

The report reflects the platform’s ongoing commitment to earn trust by being accountable while working to be safe and welcoming. Efforts include fostering authentic engagement across the comment space, safety reminders for creators, and adhering strictly to the extensive Community Guidelines.

From this iteration of the report onwards, the platform will provide information about content removals and ongoing improvements to systems when detecting, flagging, and removing violative content. In the fourth quarter of 2021, 85,794,222 videos were removed globally, which represents about one percent of all videos uploaded to TikTok.

Nearly 94.1 percent of videos were removed within 24 hours of being posted for violating Community Guidelines, 95.2 percent were removed before a user reported them, and 90.1 percent were removed before the videos had any views.

Pakistan, with 6,563,594 videos removed for violating Community Guidelines, ranked third in the world for the largest volume of videos taken down in Q4 2021.

These developments have helped in improving the speed of tackling harassment and other negative behaviour policies. To date, the steadfast progress on removing content that violates the Community Guidelines prior to receiving any views improved by 14.7 percent for harassment and bullying content, 10.9 percent for hateful behaviour, 16.2 percent for violent extremism, and 7.7 percent for dangerous acts.

A TikTok official said, “At TikTok, we believe our community should be built on a foundation of respect, kindness, and understanding. To help people forge positive digital connections in line with our rules for appropriate behaviour, we strive to empower our users to stay in control of their interactions with others on TikTok.

There’s no finish line when it comes to keeping people safe, and our latest report and continued safety improvements reflect our ongoing commitment to the well-being of our community.”

Alongside the platform’s work to proactively remove abusive and hateful content or behaviour that violates Community Guidelines, it is exploring new ways to help everyone feel more in control over comments through authentic engagement.

This spans testing ways in which users can identify comments they believe to be irrelevant or inappropriate, such as through disliking comments. The community feedback collated will add to the range of factors already in use to help keep the comment section consistently relevant and a place for genuine engagement. In addition to this, to avoid demoralizing creators, only the person who registered a dislike on a comment will be able to see that they have done so.