TikTok has published its Q2 Community Guidelines Enforcement report alongside an update on its work to protect its community from hate and harassment.
The online social platform is expanding on the many tools it provides to its community by introducing improved mute settings for comments and questions during live streams. With this latest improvement, the host or their trusted helper can temporarily mute an unkind viewer for a few seconds or minutes, or for the duration of the LIVE. If an account is muted for any amount of time, that person’s entire comment history will also be removed.
This builds on previous features introduced to promote civility and kindness.
According to Tiktok, nearly 40% of users chose to withdraw and edit their comments since the comment prompts were introduced.
The company has also continued to make steady progress in its proactive detection of hateful behaviour, bullying, and harassment. For example, 73.3% of harassment and bullying videos were removed before any reports compared to 66.2% in the first quarter this year, while 72.9% of hateful behaviour videos were removed before any reports compared to 67.3%.
To better uphold these policies, TikTok has continued to hire policy experts in civil rights, equity, and inclusion, and have rolled out unconscious bias training for its moderators.
The new report further unveiled that 81,518,334 videos were removed globally between April and June for violating Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. This figure is less than 1% of all videos uploaded on TikTok.
Of those videos, TikTok identified and removed 93.0% within 24 hours of being posted and 94.1% before a user reported them. 87.5% of removed content had zero views