TikTok has pulled down about 49 million videos for violating contents rules during the second half of 2019.
This was disclosed revealed in a transparency report released this morning. The videos represented less than 1 percent of all videos uploaded to TikTok during that time period.
TikTok says they were pulled for violations of either the app’s community guidelines or terms of service.
According to the company, most of the content removals were based on adult nudity and sexual activities.
Some of the videos were removed for depicting harmful, dangerous, or illegal behavior by minors such as drug use.
More than 16 million of the pulled videos came from users in India. The second biggest market for pulled videos was the United States, with 4.6 million videos pulled.
Unlike YouTube, there are huge numbers. YouTube allegedly removed about 14.7 million videos during the same time period in 2019.
The videos were mostly removed in the United States and India. TikTok’s video removals, by large, do not arise from government requests or copyright complaints.
The company received 1,300 copyright removal requests and 45 government takedown requests which are mostly from India.
The report also indicated that in the first half of and it did not comply with all of those requests. Like the first half of 2019, the report indicates that TikTok did not receive any takedown requests or user information requests from China, where its parent company, Bytedance, is based.
“We do not and have not removed any content at the request of the Chinese government, and would not do so if asked. TikTok has never provided user data to the Chinese government, nor would we do so if asked.” A TikTok Spokesperson said.
