Helping creators understand our rules with refreshed Community Guidelines
Julie de Bayencourt, Head of Global Product Policy at TikTok
Today we are updating our Community Guidelines. These are the rules and standards for participating in the TikTok community, which now has over 150 million people in the US and over 1 billion worldwide. These rules apply to everyone and everything on our platform.
As part of this, we are sharing the TikTok Community Principles for the first time to help people understand our decisions about how we operate to keep TikTok safe and build trust in our approach. These principles are based on our commitment to protecting human rights and are consistent with international legal standards.
These principles guide our decisions about how we moderate content so that we can strive to be fair in our actions, protect human dignity, and strike a balance between freedom of expression and the prevention of harm.
To communicate the most comprehensive updates to our Community Guidelines to date, we have consulted with over 100 organizations around the world, including our US Content Advisory Board and members of our community. Their contributions have helped us strengthen our rules and respond to new threats and potential harm. Here are some of the key changes:
- promoting our policies on how we treat synthetic media, i.e. content created or modified with AI technology;
- adding “tribe” as a protected attribute to our hate speech and hateful behavior policy;
- Learn more about our work to protect civic and election integrity, including our approach to government, politicians, and political party records.
The new Community Guidelines will go into effect on April 21st. We will be providing additional training to our moderators in the coming months to help you effectively apply these updated rules and standards as they are implemented.
We’ve gathered all the information about our rules and standards in one place so everyone from creators to researchers can get what they need based on the feedback we’ve heard. We have revisited how we thematically organize our policies into different subject areas and for each of these (e.g. behavioral and mental health) we first briefly explain what we do not allow and then we provide more details such as definitions and range of actions we could take. We have also outlined the four pillars of our approach to moderation:
- remove offensive content;
- age restriction of adult content so that only adults (18 years and older) can view it. (As a reminder, this content must comply with our Community Guidelines);
- prohibit the recommendation in the For You feed of content that is not suitable for a general audience;
- provide our community with information tools and resources to monitor their experience.
Today’s update to our Community Guidelines also expands our enforcement strategy:
- Sharing more information about the actions we’re taking on accounts that violate our policies since our update earlier this year and clarifying that we don’t allow multiple accounts to intentionally circumvent or enforce our policies.
- An explanation of the considerations we take into account when we apply our public interest policies and our approach to content that criticizes public figures.
- Including more detailed information about how we use information labels, warnings, and subscription screens.
We are proud to share these updated Community Guidelines, offering our community much more transparency about our policies and how we enforce them. It takes a whole village to keep people safe online, so we are grateful to all members of the TikTok community and all outside experts who have contributed and continue to help us improve our rules and stay one step ahead of emerging threats.
We believe that everyone deserves to feel safe online and that feeling safe is the key to unleashing imagination and creative expression. That’s why we continue to invest in our work to ensure that TikTok remains a safe, inclusive and authentic home for our global community to create, discover and connect.
