TikTok To Remove More Than 6 Million Videos In India

Aadhya Khatri - Apr 16, 2019

This act is part of TikTok's effort to create a safe environment for its Indian users

TikTok, a controversial short video sharing platform has recently removed over 6 million videos which are believed to violate its policies. Commented on this act, the company said that this move was part of its effort to create a safe and reliable environment for its users by giving them proper resources and tools.

Other measures include an age restriction that allows only people of 13 years old and older to create an account on its community. However, information such as the number of users in each country is not revealed.

TikTok sets up restriction for users under 13 years old

This latest act is in place to further ensure that users younger than 13 years old cannot join TikTok. Helena Lersch, the company’s Director Global Public Policy said that TikTok focused its effort on keeping its global community safe. These recent measures were part of the grander plan to build a positive space for Indian users. She also claimed that their acts were in accordance with the Intermediary Guidelines of India.

This mass removal followed the setup of the platform’s Safety Centre and other pages dedicated to solving bullying problems in India’s ten main local languages: Bengali, Tamil, Oriya, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Gujarati, and Kannada. For the Indian election, TikTok has launched an advisory in these ten languages as well as English on the Safety Centre.

TikTok, owned by the China-based tech company Bytedance, has been running a public service announcement (PSA) for a while now, which pops up whenever its users search for hashtag terms relating to politics. The phrases associated with the PSA are names of some politicians or political organizations like “narendramodi,” “rahulgandhi,” “bjp,” rss,” and many others. This started to happen at the time of India’s parliamentary election, which has seven phrases lasting for six weeks.