TikTok Says It Has Purged Tens Of Thousands Of Hate Videos This Year

TikTok, the massively popular platform full of short videos, is home to a variety of content, some amusing, some cringy, and some hateful. The company takes measures against the latter category, something it provided an update about today, August 20. In a long blog post, TikTok Head of Safety Eric Han talked about the company's hate speed policy, how it targets this content, improvements to transparency with users, and more.

So far this year, TikTok says it has removed more than 380,000 videos in the US that were in violation of its policy on hate speech. In addition to removing that content, the company also purged around 64,000 'hateful comments' and removed 1,300 or so accounts for the same reason.

Because the efforts to get rid of this content are only so effective, TikTok says another effort is reducing the amount of hateful content its users can find. This includes things like not showing results when users search for certain terms that usually lead to problematic content, such as 'Hitler,' as well as directing them to the Community Guidelines and getting rid of the offending content that is discovered.

What does TikTok consider hate speech? It defines it as...

...content that intends to or does attack, threaten, incite violence against, or dehumanize an individual or group of individuals on the basis of protected attributes like race, religion, gender, gender identity, national origin, and more.

In addition to removing content and making it harder to find, TikTok says that it is mindful of the evolving nature of hate speech and behavior, as well as the nuance involved in what is considered hate speech within specific communities. TikTok says it will make its content removals more transparent for users going forward and that it is expanding its teams related to these efforts.