TikTok opens itself up to scrutiny with Online Transparency Centre

In a continued effort to build trust with its audiences and advance a policy of transparency, TikTok has announced their refreshed “Online Transparency Centre”.

According to a statement by the social media giant, the updated centre will house all of TikTok’s historical transparency reports in addition to more interactive reports going forward. This also includes the “H1 2021 Content Removal Requests Reports” that were published this week.

Why do transparency reports matter on social media? 

The platform explained that these reports play an important role in staying accountable for the actions that they take to safeguard the platform and protect its integrity.

“With building trust through transparency in mind, TikTok began releasing these reports in 2019 and have continued to evolve them with new, deeper, and industry-first data disclosures. These include the volume of suspected underage account removals we made or the number of ads we rejected for not meeting our standards.”

The contents of TikTok’s Transparency Reports include:

• A community guidelines enforcement report that offers quarterly insight into the actions TikTok takes to uphold its Community Guidelines and Terms of Service.
• An information requests report that provides bi-annual data on the legal requests for user information TikTok receives from government and law enforcement agencies and the nature of their response.
• A government removal requests report that details the requests TikTok receives bi-annually from government agencies to restrict content and any actions TikTok took as a result.
• Intellectual property removal requests report that shows the volume of copyright and trademark content take-down notices and TikTok’s response on a bi-annual basis.

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TikTok’s new approach to reports and their “refreshed format” is owed, in part, to feedback from civil society organisations and experts.

The platform will also be introducing the ability to download data in machine-readable formats. 

“Additionally, the reports are now much more visual, with interactive charts and graphs to better illustrate the data and their actions.

“These 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.”

Compiled by Kaunda Selisho