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Transparency at TikTok

At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. As we work to bring this mission to life, we aspire to be transparent with our community in order to build and maintain trust.

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As part of our transparency efforts, we’ve built this page to chronicle the steps we’re taking to help keep our platform safe, share additional details about our company operations, and highlight resources like our Community Guidelines and Transparency Reports. We’ll also be welcoming experts from around the world to the TikTok Transparency and Accountability Center in Los Angeles and Washington D.C., where we’ll share additional background about our moderation practices, app policies, and technologies.

By providing insight into TikTok's practices, we hope to foster open dialogue with experts as we build upon our efforts to develop industry-leading policies and protections that create a safer experience on our platform.

We look forward to sharing our progress, both on this page and at the TikTok Transparency and Accountability Center, as we continue to provide more clarity around our platform and business.

TikTok and ByteDance

TikTok is a flagship product of ByteDance Ltd., a global technology company operating a range of content platforms that inform, educate, entertain, and inspire people across languages, cultures, and geographies. The company has over 60,000 employees across more than 125 cities globally.

Launched in May 2017, TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. TikTok helps people find community through shared interests, giving users a canvas to express their creativity and discover the world around them. As a global platform, TikTok spans all major markets except China, where ByteDance offers a different short-form video app called Douyin. TikTok has global offices including Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, New York, Dublin, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

TikTok does business through subsidiaries of ByteDance Ltd., which is backed by global institutional investors including Coatue, General Atlantic, KKR, Sequoia Capital, Susquehanna International, and Softbank.

ByteDance Ltd. Board of Directors
Yiming Zhang ByteDance Founder and CEO, Board Chairman

Arthur Dantchik Board Member; Founder, Susquehanna International

William Ford Board Member; CEO, General Atlantic

Philippe Laffont Board Member; Founder, Coatue Management

Neil Shen Board Member; Steward of Sequoia Capital

More on ByteDance

Privacy Policy

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TikTok is committed to protecting user privacy. Our Privacy Policy outlines what data we collect from users and how we use it. We also have Terms of Service that describe the rights and responsibilities of users who choose to become part of the TikTok community.

The Privacy Policy covers the TikTok experience for users age 13 and over. For information about TikTok's viewing experience for younger users and our practices in the United States regarding youth privacy, please refer to our Privacy Policy for Younger Users

Community Guidelines

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We're building a global community where users can create and share authentically, discover the world around them, and connect with others across the globe. We're also committed to keeping this community safe.

Our Community Guidelines reflect our driving philosophy – providing a platform for creative self-expression while remaining safe, diverse, and authentic – and define a common code of conduct on our platform.

TikTok Transparency Reports

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We believe transparency about our practices is an important part of building trust and being accountable to our communities. Our Transparency Reports provide insight into the legal requests we receive and how we respond, the volume and nature of content removed for violating our Community Guidelines, how our systems detect and flag potentially harmful content, and more.

We believe it is incumbent upon us to provide clear information for each market to show how we balance cooperation with legal requests and protection of user rights and the content uploaded to our platform. Through these periodic updates, our community will have the opportunity to better understand the actions we take on their behalf and to evaluate us based on up-to-date information.

Report for January 1 - June 30, 2019 (published December 30, 2019)
Report for July 1 - December 31, 2019 (published June 30, 2020)
Report for January 1 - June 30, 2020 (published September 22, 2020)
Report for July 1 - December 31, 2020 (published February 24, 2021)

January 1 - March 31, 2021 (published June 30, 2021)

Safety Center

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Our Safety Center offers information and resources that help users understand TikTok and learn more about the tools they can access to adjust their preferred privacy, safety, and wellbeing settings in the app.

The Safety Center also houses resources for parents that help explain how they can take steps to control their teens' experiences on the app.

TikTok works with industry experts, non-governmental organizations, and industry associations around the world to build a safe platform for users. The Safety Center includes information about some of the organizations we're partnering with to share best practices and exchange ideas on safety-related topics.

TikTok Content Advisory Council

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The TikTok Content Advisory Council brings together technology and safety experts who help shape our forward-looking policies that not only address the challenges of today, but also plan ahead for the next set of issues that our industry will face.

The members of the TikTok Content Advisory Council for TikTok US are:

Rob Atkinson, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Dorothy L. Espelage, Ph.D., William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Hany Farid, University of California, Berkeley Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and School of Information
Mary Anne Franks, University of Miami Law School
Vicki Harrison, Stanford Psychiatry Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing
Dawn Nunziato, Chair, George Washington University Law School
David Ryan Polgar, All Tech Is Human
Dan Schnur, USC Annenberg Center on Communication and UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies
Mutale Nkonde, fellow at Berkman Klein at Harvard and fellow at Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford

The TikTok Transparency and Accountability Center

At the TikTok Transparency and Accountability Center, guests will have the opportunity to review:

  1. How our trained content moderators apply TikTok’s Community Guidelines to review the content and accounts that are escalated to them via user reports and technology-based flagging.
  2. Our data security practices and the measures we’re taking to safeguard user privacy and information.
  3. TikTok source code, which will be made available at the center for testing and evaluation. Additionally, visitors will learn how our application's algorithm operates.

Due to constraints as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the physical opening of our Transparency and Accountability Center has been delayed. We look forward to being able to welcome guests in the near future in Los Angeles and at our upcoming Transparency and Accountability Center in Washington D.C. In the meantime, we've made adjustments to our building plans and are now able to offer virtual tours for parts of the experience.

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From Our Newsroom

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Introducing the TikTok Content Advisory council

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TikTok Introduces Family Pairing

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Our commitment to COVID-19 relief efforts

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Have fun. Be smart. Stay safe.

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