TikTok has announced new transparency reports and a new transparency centre, taking another step in their commitment to transparency and accountability. The updated centre will house all of TikTok’s historical Transparency Reports as well as their more interactive reports going forward, including their H1 2021 Content Removal Requests Reports that were published December 3.
TikTok’s Transparency Reports are important for staying accountable to the actions taken to safeguard the platform and protect its integrity. To build trust through transparency, TikTok began releasing reports in 2019 and has continued to evolve them with new, deeper, and industry-first data disclosures, such as the volume of suspected underage account removals made, or the number of ads rejected for not meeting standards.
Transparency Reports include:
• Community Guidelines Enforcement Report that offers quarterly insight into the actions taken to uphold Community Guidelines and Terms of Service.
• Information Requests Report that provides bi-annual data on the legal requests for user information received from government and law enforcement agencies and the nature of their response.
• Government Removal Requests Report that details the requests received bi-annually from government agencies to restrict content and any actions taken as a result.
• Intellectual Property Removal Requests Report that shows the volume of copyright and trademark content take-down notices and responses on a bi-annual basis.
Feedback was gathered from civil society organisations and experts as refreshed report formats were developed, and as a result TikTok will be introducing the ability to download data in machine readable formats. Additionally, reports are now much more visual, with interactive charts and graphs to better illustrate the data and their actions.
Reports will be published in 26 languages, including Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu, Bengali, Burmese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Russian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.
TikTok’s goal is to make their Transparency Centre a one-stop shop to learn about how TikTok moderates and recommends content, develops products, and safeguards people’s information.