Pakistan ranks 2nd for number of videos taken down by TikTok

By
Web Desk
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— Image: Ugo Padovani/Hans Lucas/Reuters
— Image: Ugo Padovani/Hans Lucas/Reuters

Pakistan ranks second when it comes to the number of videos removed by TikTok from its platform in the second quarter of 2021 for violation of community guidelines.

According to a statement by TikTok, the latest Community Guidelines Report states that more than 81 million videos were removed from the short-form video platform in this period.

"With 9,851,404 videos removed, Pakistan ranked second in the world for largest volume of videos taken down for community guidelines violations in Q2 2021," the statement said.

Key stats from the report

According to TikTok, to protect the safety of the community and the integrity of the platform, 81,518,334 videos were removed globally from April to June, comprising less than 1% of all uploaded content.

Of these, 93% were removed within 24 hours of posting and 94.1% before being reported by a user. Even more promising, was the finding that 87.5% of removed content had zero views.

Looking more closely at the findings, 73.3% of content promoting harassment and bullying videos and 72.9% focused on hateful behaviour were removed prior to being reported, a significant increase from the 66.2% and 67% respectively, from the first quarter of this year.

How TikTok monitors, manages negative content

"The improvement stems from the pioneering combination of technology and content moderation by a dedicated investigations team used to identify videos that violate policies," said TikTok.

"To better enforce these policies, moderators also receive regular training to identify content featuring reappropriation, slurs and bullying," it added.

Empowering users

The platform also announced improved mute settings for comments and questions during live streams, whereby hosts can temporarily mute select viewers for anywhere between a few seconds to the entire duration of the live session.

Once muted, the user’s entire comment history will also be removed, in addition to the existing option to turn off comments or limit potentially harmful comments using a keyword filter.

Further to the removal of negative content, TikTok empowers users to customise their experience with a range of tools and resources, including effective ways to filter comments on their content, delete or report multiple comments at once, and block accounts in bulk, the statement said.

More recently, prompts have been introduced to urge users to consider the impact of their words before posting unkind or violative comments. This has already proven effective with nearly four in 10 people withdrawing or editing their comments, according to TikTok.