TikTok, a popular video-sharing platform and social media app has removed over suspected 7 million TikTok under-age accounts. The company said the profiles accounted for less than 1% of its global users. Children aged 13 and above are allowed on TikTok, which is highly popular with teenagers. This is TikTok’s first time publishing such figures in their Community Guidelines Enforcement Report. They hope this will “help the industry push forward when it comes to transparency.”
TikTok touts the app as a place for creativity and self-expression but also has been criticized over misinformation, bullying, hate speech, and privacy. TikTok’s parent company ByteDance in March said it would hire more moderators to eliminate inappropriate content on its platform after an increase in government scrutiny of social media companies.
As you can see from their Community Guidelines Enforcement Report (link below), they’ve already removed nearly seven million accounts suspected to belong to underage children this year! This is less than one percent of global users — so it seems like TikTok takers safety seriously too! The report published today shows that only 15% of those who have violated community guidelines were underage.”
In its official statement, it mentioned more information about the removal of TikTok Under-age profiles
- TikTok said it removed some 6.1 million videos from the app, fewer than 1% of all videos uploaded.
- Nearly 80% of them were removed before they could be viewed by other users on the site, 91% before any user reported them, and 93% within 24 hours of being posted on the platform.
- Advertising guidelines violations resulted in 1,921,900 ads getting rejected
- In total, 11.15 million accounts were removed for violating guidelines or the terms of service during this time period.
“One of the difficulties TikTok faces is in verifying an account’s age,” said Chris Stokel-Walker, author of TikTok Boom. “For decades, it’s been possible to bypass age verification checks simply by saying you are older than you are and inputting a fake date of birth.
TikTok has some of the world’s most advanced computer vision technology, which can likely spot under-aged users with reasonable accuracy. But using such technology would require a user’s permission, which people may feel uneasy about.
TikTok‘s parent company ByteDance is accused of collecting user data without the user’s permission. Well, this is a great move by TikTok but, it still got to do a lot to gain their trust back from the government as well as users.
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