Combating Hateful Content and Behavior on TikTok

TikTok is a diverse and growing community that connects people from all walks of life through creative expression. As the Head of Safety, my team and I are dedicated to protecting our users and ensuring a positive experience on the app. One area we are particularly focused on is combating hateful content and behavior.

To address this issue, we have implemented several strategies. Firstly, we have evolved our hate speech policy to proactively detect and remove any content that attacks, threatens, incites violence against, or dehumanizes individuals or groups based on protected attributes such as race, religion, gender, gender identity, and national origin. We regularly consult with experts to update our policies and ensure they account for new forms of hateful behavior.

Secondly, we have a zero tolerance stance on hate groups and accounts associated with them. We remove hateful content and ban accounts that promote hate, including those linked to white supremacy, nationalism, male supremacy, anti-semitism, and other hate-based ideologies. We also remove race-based harassment and deny the denial of violent tragedies like the Holocaust and slavery. We may also consider off-platform behavior when enforcing our policies.

Additionally, we are working to make it more difficult for people to find hateful content and accounts. When someone searches for a hateful ideology or group, we take various actions to prevent the spread of hate, such as removing related content, refraining from showing results, or redirecting the search to our Community Guidelines.

We are also increasing cultural awareness in our content moderation. We train our enforcement teams to better detect evolving forms of hate, offensive stereotypes, and symbols. We understand that different communities have different experiences, and we strive to incorporate this understanding into our policies. For example, we educate our moderation teams on the context behind slurs used as terms of empowerment by disenfranchised groups, while also removing slurs used hatefully.

Transparency is another key aspect of our approach. We want our community to know that we listen to their feedback and are transparent about the reasons for content removal. We have introduced features that notify users if they duet or react to a video that was removed for violating our guidelines. We are also improving our appeals process and proactively educating users about our Community Guidelines.

Lastly, we are investing in our teams and partnerships to enhance our ability to detect and address hateful behavior. We have added leaders with expertise in enforcement to our product and engineering teams. We also seek feedback from experts and collaborate with civil society organizations to continuously improve our policies and processes.

While completely eliminating hate on TikTok may be a challenging task, we are committed to making progress and creating a more welcoming community. We understand the complexity of these issues and are dedicated to learning from our mistakes and the mistakes of others. By working together, we will continue to improve our policies, processes, and products to ensure TikTok remains a place where everyone feels welcome.