TikTok downloaded more than 49 million videos from users worldwide in the second half of 2019, according to the transparency report released this morning.
The videos accounted for less than 1% of all videos uploaded to TikTok during that time period. TikTok says they were taken down from its platform for violating the app or terms of service. In December, the company said a quarter of the content taken down involved “adult nudity and sexual activity.” A percentage of the videos were removed for “depicting harmful, dangerous, or illegal behavior by minors,” such as drug use. Harassment and hate speech are a small number, accounting for just 3% and 1% of total videos, respectively.
More than 16 million videos downloaded came from users in India. The second largest community was the United States, with 4.6 million videos.
These are huge numbers compared to YouTube, which reported removing about 14.7 million videos during the same period in 2019. The United States and India were also the top YouTube communities for the controversial issue.
TikTok’s video takedowns generally don’t stem from government requests or copyright complaints. TikTok says it received only 1,300 copyright takedown requests and 45 government takedown requests (mostly from India), and it didn’t comply with all of those requests. Like the first half of 2019, the report shows that TikTok received no takedown requests or user information requests from China, where its parent company, Bytedance.
“We have never removed content at the request of the Chinese government, and we would not do so if asked to do so,” a TikTok spokesperson said. The spokesperson also said that TikTok “has never provided data to the Chinese government and has no intention of doing so.”
The details come from TikTok's second transparency report, which covers the dates from July 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019. The company published its first transparency report, covering the first half of 2019, at the end of December.
TikTok has come under intense scrutiny from U.S. politicians concerned about the immense popularity of an app owned by a Chinese company. Earlier this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even floated the idea of banning TikTok, amid concerns that it could be funneling users’ personal information to the Chinese government. TikTok has vehemently denied that this has happened or is about to happen.
The transparency reports are partly intended to help build trust in the app. This report is the first to expand on TikTok's oversight policies and the company says it will provide more detailed information in the future. At the end of last year, Bytedance introduced a «new content oversight infrastructure» that cites specific reasons for removing a video, such as those shared in December.
Content moderation across social platforms has been a huge area of concern in recent years, as platforms like Facebook and Twitter have struggled to tackle hate speech, harassment, and misinformation.
TikTok’s transparency report seems to suggest that the platform is mostly concerned with other issues — or, at least, that issues like nudity are the bulk of the problems it detects — and that it generally prevents problems with videos. The company says it automatically detected more than 98% of videos that were downloaded without being reported by users. Nearly 90% of those videos received no views at all.
