Many of us love to scroll on Tiktok as a pasttime, but we might be unaware of all the dangers that lurk on the app. Since anyone can upload to it, the wild west of Tiktok is bound to be a minefield. Luckily, Tiktok has strict regulations and automated moderation that keep the app as safe as possible for its users.
In their Community Guidelines Enforcement Reports, Tiktok reveals that they took down a whopping 333 million videos in Q1 – Q3. The report for Q4 has yet to be released.
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In the 2023 reports, Malaysia was one of the top 50 regions where the most videos are removed for all 3 quarters. These 50 regions make up 90% of removals globally.
According to Marketing Interactive, TikTok removed a total of 1,555,199 videos from Malaysia in 2023 for violating community guidelines.
These guidelines are categorised as:
- Integrity and Authenticity
- Mental and Behavioural Health
- Privacy and Security
- Regulated Goods and Commercial Activities
- Safety and Civility
- Sensitive and Mature Themes, and
- Youth Safety and Well-Being
Sensitive and mature themes was the sector with the most violations in Q2 and Q3, the majority of which covered inappropriately sexual content on the PG13 app. Tiktok’s automated moderation is clearly on top of its game, with more than half of each quarter’s removals being automated.
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In Malaysia, the automated algorithms were working overtime with a staggering 96.8% of the videos were removed before any user reports. 77.6% of these videos were removed before getting any views, and 90.8% of the videos were removed within 24 hours of posting to minimise the damage they may cause.
In addition to that, Tiktok’s Q1 report reveals there was a covert operation to spread propaganda on the site with regards to the Malaysian elections, with 175 accounts involved. The accounts had a total of 285,511 followers between them, and they were spamming identical comments in English and Malay on many videos.
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Tiktok is definitely becoming a part of the legal landscape, with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) making 346 requests to TikTok to take down or erase content between 2020 and January 2023. Communications and digital minister Fahmi Fadzil reported that 94% of the agency’s requests were successfully removed.
Singapore was not one of the regions Tiktok provided data for.
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