A broad series of new policies aiming to increase safety and well-being on TikTok will ban misogyny and content that deadnames or misgenders people, among other things.
The burgeoning social media company announced the policy changes Tuesday in a sweeping update, months after company executives were grilled by a Senate subcommittee over its efforts to keep children safe online.
The company also explicitly banned content that “promotes conversion therapy programs” in an effort to clarify what it considers “the types of hateful ideologies” it already prohibited.
“Though these ideologies have long been prohibited on TikTok, we’ve heard from creators and civil society organizations that it’s important to be explicit in our Community Guidelines,” Cormac Keenan, the company’s head of trust and safety, said in a statement announcing the changes. “On top of this, we hope our recent feature enabling people to add their pronouns will encourage respectful and inclusive dialogue on our platform.”
Notably, the update also expands TikTok’s ban on content that promotes eating disorders to include “disordered eating,” a category the short-form video platform ― and others, like Instagram ― has long struggled to police.
A 2021 investigation by the Wall Street Journal found TikTok readily directed a dozen fake accounts posing as 13-year-olds to videos glamorizing eating disorders:
The videos showed emaciated girls with protruding bones, a ‘corpse bride diet,’ an invitation to a private ‘Christmas-themed competition’ to lose as much weight as possible before the holiday and a shaming for those who give up on getting thin: ‘You do realise giving up after a week isn’t going to get you anywhere, right? … You’re disgusting, it’s really embarrassing.’
These policy changes are all well and good, but actually enforcing the rules and screening content remains another challenge entirely (looking at you, Facebook!).
TikTok said Tuesday it removed 91 million videos in the third quarter of 2021 for violating its policies, accounting for roughly 1% of all videos uploaded, and that 95.1% of those were flagged internally before users reported them. But as we’ve learned from Facebook, artificial enforcement intelligence is only so good; it’s difficult to account for what you’re missing; rules are easy to circumvent; and policies aren’t always evenly executed.
Last year, for instance, a viral TikTok challenge directed students to vandalize school property, resulting in extensive damage at school districts across the country. A separate series of viral TikTok posts saw shooting and bomb threats also force schools to cancel classes and increase security.
Both trends presumably violated TikTok’s community guidelines, yet nevertheless gained wide traction and caused very real problems.