TikTok deletes 1.7M videos by Nigerian users in Q4 2023

Short-video social media platform TikTok has deleted 1.7 million videos by Nigerian users during the fourth quarter of 2023.

Owned by Bytedance, the social media platform said Nigeria was listed as one of the top 50 countries where videos breached the company's standards in the fourth quarter of 2023. Furthermore, it added that throughout the evaluation period, 176.5 million videos were taken down worldwide.

In its Community Guidelines Enforcement report, TikTok cited that the top 50 markets where policies were violated accounted for approximately 90% of all content removals for that quarter.

The social media platform's report said it had deleted videos violating TikTok's rules pertaining to safety, civility, mental and behavioral health, privacy and security, integrity, and authenticity, among others.

Furthermore, the platform added that it had deleted 169 million accounts that had been found to be fraudulent or spam during that period.

"From October through to the end of 2023, we removed more than 169 million fake accounts globally, and we have removed about 1.2 million bot comments on content tagged with hashtags related to the Israel-Hamas war," TikTok said.

The company explained that it remained vigilant in its efforts to detect external threats and safeguard the platform from fake accounts and engagement.

"These threats persistently probe and attack our systems, leading to occasional fluctuations in the reported metrics within these areas," it continued.

TikTok said Nigeria was listed as one of the top 50 nations that had videos that breached its standards in Q4 of 2023. (Source: Image by Freepik)

"Despite this, we are steadfast in our commitment to promptly identify and remove any accounts, content, or activities that seek to artificially boost popularity on our platform. During the fourth quarter of 2023, we saw an increase in some of our fake engagement metrics," the company explained.

TikTok added that during the period, 1.03 billion likes on videos were also deleted.

It removed 4.9 billion fraudulent follow requests and 720 million fake followers.

According to TikTok, the deleted likes, followers, and follow requests were found to have originated from automated or inauthentic mechanisms.

TikTok making African headlines

The short-video social media platform has been making the news on the continent in recent times.

In September 2023, the Kenyan Film Classification Board (KFCB) urged TikTok to disable its live feature to stop content creators from making explicit sexual content on TikTok livestreams at night.

There have been calls in African countries for the platform to be regulated or banned. In August 2023, TikTok was banned in Somalia due to the spread of explicit content.

Want to know more? Sign up to get the weekly Connecting Africa newsletter direct to your inbox.

TikTok has also been dealing with backlash in other countries on the continent. In June 2023, there were calls to have the platform banned in the East African country of Uganda.

Furthermore, calls for a TikTok ban in Egypt intensified in December 2022 after a 13-year-old was paralyzed while performing a dangerous viral challenge.

The video platform TikTok has been threatened with bans in the United States over its alleged ties to the Chinese government and it was banned by the state of Montana in May 2023.

*Top image source: Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik.

— Matshepo Sehloho, Associate Editor, Connecting Africa