ISLAMABAD: Pakistan ranked fourth in the world vis-à-vis the number of videos taken down by TikTok — over six million — during the July-September quarter of last year for violating its guidelines.

According to the “Community guidelines enforcement report”, released by the video-sharing platform on Monday, it removed 73.9 per cent of content against which there were complaints that they encouraged harassment and bullying, while 72.4 per cent of videos found to be inciting hate were removed before anyone reported them.

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

However, this number amounts to only one per cent of all videos uploaded on the platform and 95 per cent of these videos were removed before a user lodged a complaint.

Eighty-eight per cent of them were taken off before the video received any views and 93 per cent were removed within 24 hours of being posted. The company plans to put in place a mechanism for state-of-the-art cyber monitoring in Washington, Dublin (Ireland) and Singapore later this year.

According to the company, since the volume of automated removals had gone up, the TikTok team can now focus on reviewing nuanced content, such as hate-speech, bullying, harassment and misinformation. TikTok has come up with updates to its community guidelines in order to improve the “integrity of the platform”, the report said.

Published in Dawn, February 15th, 2022