Social media giant TikTok has announced that they are refreshing their Community Guidelines. These guidelines set the rules and standards for being a part of the TikTok community, and they apply to all aspects of the platform.
According to a press release on Wednesday, TikTok has also shared its Community Principles for the first time.
These principles are based on the company’s commitment to upholding human rights and are aligned with international legal frameworks.
They guide the company’s decisions about how they moderate content, aiming to be fair, protect human dignity, and balance freedom of expression with preventing harm.
TikTok consulted over 100 organizations from around the world, as well as members of their community, to inform the most comprehensive update to their Community Guidelines to date. The input they received helped them strengthen their rules and respond to new threats and potential harms.
Some fundamental changes include advancing their rules for how they treat synthetic media, adding ‘tribe’ as a protected attribute in their hate speech and hateful behaviour policies, and providing more detail about their work to protect civic and election integrity.
The new Community Guidelines have taken effect on April 21st. TikTok will provide additional training to their moderators in the coming months to help them enforce these updated rules and standards effectively as they roll out.
TikTok has overhauled how it organises its rules thematically into different topic areas. For each of these areas, such as Behavioral & Mental Health, they explain briefly what they don’t allow, then provide more details, such as definitions and the range of actions they might take.
They have also laid out the four pillars of their approach to moderation: removing violative content, age-restricting mature content, making content ineligible for recommendation in the For You feed that isn’t appropriate for a broad audience, and empowering the community with information, tools, and resources to stay in control of their experience.
TikTok’s update to their Community Guidelines also expands on their enforcement strategy by sharing more information about the actions they take against accounts that violate their rules, explaining the considerations they take into account when enforcing their rules based on public interests, and including more detail about how they use informational labels, warnings, and opt-in screens.
TikTok is proud to share these refreshed Community Guidelines with their community and offer more transparency about their rules and how they enforce them. They believe everyone deserves to feel safe online and that feeling safe is vital to unlocking imagination and creative expression.
TikTok will continue to invest in its work to keep its platform a safe, inclusive, and authentic home for its global community. They are grateful to everyone in the TikTok community and the external experts who have contributed and continue to help them advance their rules and stay ahead of emerging threats.
