TikTok on Wednesday announced the deletion of 360,000 videos in Kenya, making it the tenth African nation to experience a crackdown as the video-sharing app adopts stricter measures to enforce guidelines. This brings the total videos deleted across 10 African countries to over 12 million in the second quarter of 2024.
The recent media report of TikTok deleting over 360,000 videos in Kenya makes the country the tenth African country to experience the clampdown, bringing to total of over 12 million videos deleted by TikTok from 10 African countries in the second quarter of 2024 due to its rules violation.
On Thursday, Techpression reported that TikTok had banned approximately 60,000 Kenyan accounts in the same period, with 57,262 accounts suspended because the users were suspected of being under the age of 13, in the second quarter of 2024 due to violations of its Community Guidelines.
Read also: TikTok cracks down on Kenyan content, removes 360,000 videos
Enforcing age restrictions became a top concern during the cleanup, to douse concerns regarding the safety of young users on the video-sharing app.
95 percent of illegal videos were taken down within 24 hours of their uploading, and 99.1 percent were deleted before users reported them.
Here is the breakdown of the total number of videos deleted by TikTok from the African countries: Egypt is at the top of the list with 2,754,574 videos deleted, followed by Nigeria (2,137,687), Algeria (1,837,202), Somalia (1,380,154), Libya (1,149,855), Ethiopia (702,622), Sudan (665,456), Morocco (645,560), and South Africa (614,406).
Deleting violating videos record remarkable success with the use of AI
TikTok’s Q2 2024 Community Guidelines Enforcement Report details the cleanup effort, which highlights the company’s increasing use of AI to monitor content, particularly those that violate stipulated rules.
At least, 144 million of the 178 million videos were deleted globally in June 2024 through automated processes.
The platform’s proactive detection rate is arguably its most noteworthy feature. Due to this technological development, TikTok’s global proactive detection rate has increased to a record-breaking 98.2 percent.
Globally, the company’s AI-powered strategy has produced remarkable outcomes; automated systems currently remove 80 percent of videos, a significant rise from 62 percent a year ago.
“With over a billion people and millions of pieces of content posted to our platform every day, we continue to prioritise and enhance TikTok’s automated moderation technology as such technology enables faster and consistent removal of content that violates our rules,” TikTok stated in its report.
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TikTok global legal battle
These changes occur at a critical moment for TikTok, as the app is under scrutiny in other countries, including the U.S.
US authorities have voiced concerns about data security and possible surveillance in the company’s ongoing legal dispute over its Chinese ownership, which both TikTok and Chinese authorities vehemently refute.
In order to avoid the app being banned in the US, ByteDance, the platform’s owner, has until January to sell TikTok’s U.S. assets.