TikTok removes 6m Pakistani videos over violation of guidelines

TikTok, a video-sharing application, has ranked Pakistan fourth in the world for violating community guidelines.

In a report released on Monday, the company revealed it has removed over six million Pakistani videos from the app from July to September 2021.

The United States ranks first with 13.9 million videos removed while Russia follows suit with 6.8 million videos taken down. Indonesia listed third.

According to the Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, majority of the content removed promoted harassment and bullying. Meanwhile, 72.4% of the videos found to be “inciting hate” were removed before anyone reported them.

“In order to protect the safety of the community and to preserve the integrity of the platform, 91.44m videos were removed across the world between July 1 and Sept 30 last year,” it stated.

This number, however, amounts to only 1% of all the clips uploaded on the platform and 95% of these videos were removed before a user lodged a complaint.

More than 15 million videos were taken down by TikTok over “nude and sexual content”.

In Pakistan, TikTok has been banned four times on complaints of “immoral, indecent, and inappropriate” content.

New guidelines

Last year, TikTok launched an Urdu-language safety centre in Pakistan to ensure videos posted on the app are in check with the government’s guidelines.

The application has updated its information portal as well which has now been divided into sections such as child protection, parental guidelines, protection against bullies, and suicide alerts.

Safety and Privacy Controls: It will teach users how to set up their accounts so that they can feel comfortable and secure on the platform. It will also allow them to limit the list of people who can leave comments on their videos, shoot duets or send messages.

Guide: It enables users to learn about TikTok’s policies regarding safety, privacy, and protection. It also includes details about the range of choices and settings offered by the application

Topic: This section is dedicated to deal with bullying. A team moderating content on the app will respond to comments intended to bully users. It has a “Suicide and Self-harm” subsection that will prevent suicidal content.