TikTok Updates Community Guidelines To Provide More Protection For Users

Riyadh, KSA – gulftech: The world’s leading short-form video platform,TikTok, has today released its updated Community Guidelines which will focus on expanding their current policies whilst also introducing new standalone policies.

TikTok believes that people should be able to express themselves creatively and be entertained in a safe, secure, and welcoming environment. For this very reason, the social platform announced updated Community Guidelines that further support the well-being of the community and the integrity of the platform.

Being transparent to their community is essential for TikTok and these new updates will help identify the types of behavior and content that will be removed or marked ineligible for  the ‘For You’ feed. The new Community Guidelines support a set of norms which helps the viewer and content creator to make the right decisions of creating or reporting based on them. By taking into account emerging trends or threats observed across various social platforms, TikTok’s policies have been designed to foster an experience that prioritizes safety, inclusion, and authenticity.

Some of the main updates that were announced and will be implemented over the next few weeks include:

Strengthening the dangerous acts and challenges policy. TikTok continues to enact the stricter approach that was previously announced to help prevent the spreading of content related to suicide hoaxes on the platform. This previously sat within thier suicide and self-harm policies, but now will be highlighted in a separate category with more details; making it easier for the TikTok community to familiarize with it.

Broadening their approach on eating disorders: In addition to removing content that promotes eating disorders, TikTok will also start to remove the promotion of disordered eating, after consultations from eating disorders experts, researchers, and physicians, as they suggest that people can struggle with unhealthy eating patterns and behavior without even being diagnosed with an eating disorder. TikTok aims to acknowledge more symptoms, such as overexercise or short-term fasting, that are frequently under-recognized symptoms of a potential problem. This is an incredibly nuanced area that’s difficult to correct, which is why they are working to train their teams to remain alert to a broader scope of content.

Expanding their policy to protect the security, integrity, availability, and reliability on the platform. This stresses on prohibiting unauthorized access to TikTok, its content, accounts, systems, data, and prohibiting the use of TikTok to perpetrate criminal activity.

Additionally, the TikTok community can find more information about the content categories ineligible for recommendation on ‘For You’ feed. The ability to discover new ideas, creators, and interests is what makes the platform unique; but when content from a creator who wasn’t followed or interests that haven’t been previously engaged is continuously displayed, it can be a cause of concern when it appears in the ‘For You’ feed. Which is why when the platform comes across content that may not be appropriate for the general audience, regardless of age, TikTok does its best to remove it from the recommendation system.

Commenting on the updated guidelines, Farah Tukan, Head of Public Policy at TikTok Middle East, Turkey, Africa and Pakistan said: “To hold ourselves accountable to our community, NGOs, and others, we release Community Guidelines Enforcement Reports quarterly. The report published today shows that over 91 million violative videos were removed during Q3 2021, comprising 1% of all videos uploaded. Of these, 95.1% were removed before being reported, 88.8% before receiving views and 93.9% within 24 hours of being posted. We will continue to expand our system that detects and removes certain categories of violations at upload. As a result, the volume of automated removals has increased, which improves the overall safety of our platform and enables our team to focus more time on reviewing contextual or nuanced content.”

TikTok has made significant strides to improve the policies and guidelines, including their efficacy, speed, and consistency, even though they are aware that there’s no finish line when it comes to keeping people safe, their passion to help its audience have an enriching experience on TikTok, does not make it look impossible.