TikTok

Report March 2025

Submitted
TikTok's mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. In a global community such as ours with millions of users it is natural for people to have different opinions, so we seek to operate on a shared set of facts and reality when it comes to topics that impact people’s safety. Ensuring a safe and authentic environment for our community is critical to achieving our goals - this includes making sure our users have a trustworthy experience on TikTok. As part of creating a trustworthy environment, transparency is essential to enable online communities and wider society to assess TikTok's approach to its regulatory obligations. TikTok is committed to providing insights into the actions we are taking as a signatory to the Code of Practice on Disinformation (the Code). 

Our full executive summary is available as part of our report, which can be downloaded by following the link below.

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Commitment 26
Relevant Signatories commit to provide access, wherever safe and practicable, to continuous, real-time or near real-time, searchable stable access to non-personal data and anonymised, aggregated, or manifestly-made public data for research purposes on Disinformation through automated means such as APIs or other open and accessible technical solutions allowing the analysis of said data.
We signed up to the following measures of this commitment
Measure 26.1 Measure 26.2 Measure 26.3
In line with this commitment, did you deploy new implementation measures (e.g. changes to your terms of service, new tools, new policies, etc)?
Yes
If yes, list these implementation measures here
  • Continued to refine the new Virtual Compute Environment (VCE), launched May 2024, by:
    • Providing access to public U18 data. 
    • Adding new data points (e.g., Hashtag Info) and endpoints (e.g., Playlist Info). See Changelog. 
    • Establishing a new due diligence process with an external partner to confirm the eligibility of NGO applicants. 
  • Continued to support independent research through the Research API and improve accessibility by:
    • Adding three new endpoints for TikTok Shop, which launched in Spain and Ireland in December 2024.
    • Making Python and R (programming languages) wrappers available via GitHub.
  • Continued to make the Commercial Content API available in Europe to bring transparency to paid advertising, advertisers and other commercial content on TikTok.
  • Continued to offer our Commercial Content Library, a publicly searchable EU ads database with information about paid ads and ad metadata, such as the advertising creative, dates the ad was active for, the main parameters used for targeting (e.g. age, gender), the number of people who were served the ad.

Do you plan to put further implementation measures in place in the next 6 months to substantially improve the maturity of the implementation of this commitment?
No
If yes, which further implementation measures do you plan to put in place in the next 6 months?
We are continuously reviewing and improving our tools and processes to fight misinformation and disinformation and will report on any further development in the next COPD report. 
Measure 26.1
Relevant Signatories will provide public access to non-personal data and anonymised, aggregated or manifestly-made public data pertinent to undertaking research on Disinformation on their services, such as engagement and impressions (views) of content hosted by their services, with reasonable safeguards to address risks of abuse (e.g. API policies prohibiting malicious or commercial uses).
QRE 26.1.1
Relevant Signatories will describe the tools and processes in place to provide public access to non-personal data and anonymised, aggregated and manifestly-made public data pertinent to undertaking research on Disinformation, as well as the safeguards in place to address risks of abuse.

(I) Research API

To make it easier to independently research our platform and bring transparency to TikTok content, we built a Research API that provides researchers in the US, EEA, UK and Switzerland, with access to public data on accounts and content, including comments, captions, subtitles, number of comments, shares, likes, followers and following lists, and favourites that a video receives on our platform. More information is available here. We carefully consider feedback from researchers who have used the API and continue to make improvements such as additional data fields, streamlining the application process, and enabling collaboration through Lab Access, which allows up to 10 researchers to work together on a shared research project.

(II) Virtual Compute Environment (VCE)

The VCE allows qualifying non-academic not-for-profit researchers in the EU to access and analyse TikTok's public data, while ensuring robust security and privacy protections. Public data can be accessed and analysed in 2 stages:

  1. Test Stage: Query the data using TikTok's query software development kit (SDK). The VCE will return random sample data based on your query, limited to 5,000 records per day.
  2. Execution Stage: Submit a script to execute against all public data. TikTok provides a powerful search capability that allows data to be paginated in increments of up to 100,000 records. TikTok will review the results file to make sure the output is aggregated.

(III) Commercial Content API  

As required under the DSA, and to enhance transparency on advertisements presented on our platform, we have built a commercial content API that includes ads, ad and advertiser metadata, and targeting information. Researchers and professionals are required to create a TikTok for Developers account and submit an application to access the Commercial Content API which we review to help prevent malicious actors from misusing this data. 

(IV) Commercial Content Library

The Commercial Content Library is a publicly searchable database with information about paid ads and ad metadata, such as the advertising creative, dates the ad ran, main parameters used for targeting (e.g. age, gender), number of people who were served the ad, and more. It also includes information about content that's commercial in nature and tagged with either a paid partnership label or promotional label, such as content that promotes a brand, product or service, but is not a paid ad. 
QRE 26.1.2
Relevant Signatories will publish information related to data points available via Measure 25.1, as well as details regarding the technical protocols to be used to access these data points, in the relevant help centre. This information should also be reachable from the Transparency Centre. At minimum, this information will include definitions of the data points available, technical and methodological information about how they were created, and information about the representativeness of the data.
In this H2 2024 report,TikTok has shared more than 3000 data points across 30 EU/EEA countries - this is a slight decrease as compared to the 3,300 data points from our previous report. The reduction is due to the fact that we are no longer reporting COVID-19-specific metrics in this report. As the pandemic has transitioned from an acute global crisis to a more managed public health issue, the relevance and utility of these metrics have diminished.

We provide access to researchers to data that is publicly available on our platform through our Research Tools and through our Commercial Content API for commercial content (detailed below).

We also provide ongoing insights into the action we take against content and accounts that violate our CGs, Terms of Service, or Advertising Policies, in our quarterly TikTok Community Guideline Enforcement Reports. The report includes a variety of data visualisations, which are designed with transparency and accessibility in mind, including for people with colour vision deficiency.

We work hard to supplement the comprehensive data in the report and provide new insights. For example, we recently shared data on comment enforcement, including the number of comments we removed and the percentage of published comments we removed.

As part of our continued efforts to make it easy to study the TikTok platform, the report also offers access to aggregated data, including removal data by policy category, for the 50 markets with the highest volumes of removed content.

SLI 26.1.1
Relevant Signatories will provide quantitative information on the uptake of the tools and processes described in Measure 26.1, such as number of users.
Research Tools, Commercial Content API, and the Commercial Content Library
During this reporting period we received:
  • 148 applications to access TikTok’s Research Tools (Research API and VCE) from researchers in the EU and EEA.
  • 61 applications to access the TikTok Commercial Content API.
Country Number of applications received for Research API Number of applications accepted for Research API Number of applications rejected for Research API Number of applications received for TikTok Commercial Content Library API Number of applications accepted for TikTok Commercial Content Library API Number of applications rejected for TikTok Commercial Content Library API
Austria 5 3 1 1 1 0
Belgium 0 0 0 3 3 0
Bulgaria 1 0 0 1 1 0
Croatia 2 0 2 0 0 0
Czech Republic 2 1 1 0 0 0
Denmark 4 3 0 0 0 0
Finland 1 2 0 3 2 1
France 16 4 6 11 8 3
Germany 50 12 16 14 11 3
Greece 5 1 3 0 0 0
Hungary 1 1 1 2 2 0
Ireland 3 2 4 1 1 0
Italy 13 5 2 2 2 0
Latvia 0 0 0 1 1 0
Lithuania 0 0 0 2 2 0
Netherlands 17 7 7 3 2 1
Poland 3 0 1 3 2 1
Portugal 2 2 0 2 2 0
Romania 6 1 1 0 0 0
Slovakia 0 0 0 1 1 0
Spain 11 2 4 6 4 2
Sweden 4 3 1 4 3 1
Norway 2 2 0 1 1 0
Total EU 146 49 50 60 48 12
Total EEA 148 51 50 61 49 12