TikTok removed 4m ‘violative’ videos in EU last month

BRUSSELS: TikTok said on Wednesday it pulled four million “violative” videos in the EU in September, in its first transparency report since a new law against illegal and harmful content came into force across the bloc.

The Chinese-owned video-sharing platform favoured by younger online users also stressed that it has 6,125 employees whose job is to moderate content in the European Union, in all its national languages.

The figures were given as part of TikTok´s obligation under the EU´s new Digital Services Act (DSA) for major online platforms to provide a transparency report every six months. TikTok did not previously release monthly removal data for the bloc as a whole, leaving the significance of the September figure unclear until compared with future reports. The DSA, which came into effect in August, threatens very large online platforms and search engines with fines that can go up to six percent of global turnover for violations.

TikTok and 18 other platforms fall into that category for heightened EU scrutiny, because they have at least 45 million monthly users in the bloc.

Others include: Meta´s Facebook and Instagram; Alphabet´s YouTube and Google Search; X, formerly known as Twitter; Microsoft´s Bing search engine and LinkedIn; Apple´s AppStore; Alibaba´s AliExpress; and Wikipedia. The European Commission last week announced it has opened probes into TikTok and Meta, asking them to give more details on what measures they have taken to stop the spread of “illegal content and disinformation” after the Hamas attack on Israel. TikTok said that, as of September 2023, it had 134 million users in the European Union.