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 28
COOPERATION WITH RESEARCHERS Relevant Signatories commit to support good faith research into Disinformation that involves their services.
We signed up to the following measures of this commitment
Measure 28.1 Measure 28.2 Measure 28.3 Measure 28.4
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 ran, main parameters used for targeting (e.g. age, gender), number of people who were served the ad, and more. 

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 28.1
Relevant Signatories will ensure they have the appropriate human resources in place in order to facilitate research, and should set-up and maintain an open dialogue with researchers to keep track of the types of data that are likely to be in demand for research and to help researchers find relevant contact points in their organisations.
QRE 28.1.1
Relevant Signatories will describe the resources and processes they deploy to facilitate research and engage with the research community, including e.g. dedicated teams, tools, help centres, programs, or events.

TikTok is committed to facilitating research and engaging with the research community.

As set out above, TikTok is committed to facilitating research through our Research Tools, Commercial Content APIs and Commercial Content Library, full details of which are available on our TikTok for Developers and Commercial Content Library websites.

We have many teams and individuals across product, policy, data science, outreach and legal working to facilitate research. We believe transparency and accountability are essential to fostering trust with our community. We are committed to transparency in how we operate, moderate and recommend content, empower users, and secure our platform. That's why we opened our global Transparency and Accountability Centers (TACs) for invited guests to see first-hand our work to protect the safety and security of the TikTok platform..

Our TACs are located in Dublin, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Washington, DC. In October 2024, we opened our rehoused Dublin based TAC in TikTok’s new premises. DUBTAC offers an opportunity for academics, businesses, policymakers, politicians, regulators, researchers and many other expert audiences from Europe and around the world to see first-hand how teams at TikTok go about the critically important work of securing our community's safety, data, and privacy. During the reporting period, DUBTAC hosted the following visits: 

  • 22 external tours including 3 NGO/industry bodies, 6 media representatives, and 2 creators. 
  • On 22 & 23 October 2024 respectively, we welcomed the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) Safety Advisory Council and the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey (MENAT) Safety Advisory Council members. These visits were attended by TikTok T&S personnel where there were discussions on a range of topics and exchanges of views. 
  • In November 2024, we welcomed the Latin America (LATAM) Safety Advisory Council. 

We work closely with our nine regional Advisory Councils, including our European Safety Advisory Council andUS Content Advisory Council, and our global Youth Advisory Council, which bring together a diverse array of independent experts from academia and civil society as well as youth perspectives. Advisory Council members provide subject matter expertise and advice on issues relating to user safety, content policy, and emerging issues that affect TikTok and our community, including in the development of our AI-generated content label and a recent campaign to raise awareness around AI labeling and potentially misleading AIGC.These councils are an important way to bring outside perspectives into our company and onto our platform.

In addition to these efforts, there are a plethora of ways through which we engage with the research community in the course of our work.

Our Outreach & Partnerships Management (OPM) Team is dedicated to establishing partnerships and regularly engaging with civil society stakeholders and external experts, including the academic and research community, to ensure their perspectives inform our policy creation, feature development, risk mitigation, and safety strategies. For example, we engaged with global experts, including numerous academics in Europe, in the development of our state-affiliated media policy, Election Misinformation policies, and AI-generated content labels. OPM also plays an important role in our efforts to counter misinformation by identifying, onboarding and managing new partners to our fact-checking programme. In H2 2024, we expanded fact-checking coverage to a number of wider-European and EU candidate countries:
  • Moldova: AFP/Reuters 
  • Georgia: Fact Check Georgia
  • Albania & Kosovo: Internews Kosova 
  • Serbia: Lead Stories
  • Kazakhstan: Reuters

In the lead-up to certain elections, we invite suitably qualified external local/regional experts, as part of our Election Speaker Series.Sharing their market expertise with our internal teams provides us with insights to better understand areas that could potentially amount to election manipulation, and informs our approach to the upcoming election.

During this reporting period, we ran 9 Election Speaker Series sessions, 7 in EU Member States and 2 in Georgia and Moldova. 

  1. France: Agence France-Presse (AFP)
  2. Germany: German Press Agency (dpa)
  3. Austria: German Press Agency (dpa)
  4. Lithuania: Logically Facts
  5. Romania: Funky Citizens
  6. Ireland: Logically Facts
  7. Croatia: Faktograf
  8. Georgia: FactCheck Georgia
  9. Moldova: Stop Fals!
TikTok teams and personnel also regularly participate in research-focused events. At the end of June 2024, we sent a 12 strong delegation to GlobalFact11 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. TikTok was one of three top-tier sponsors of GlobalFact11, the International Fact-Checking Network’s largest gathering for professional fact-checkers. In addition to sponsorship, we participated in an on-the-record mainstage presentation answering questions about our misinformation strategy and partnerships with professional fact-checkers. We also had meetings with many existing and potentially new partners as well as the EFCSN. In September 2024, we sent a delegation of 16 to the Trust & Safety Research Conference at Stanford University. In October, we sponsored, attended, and presented at Disinfo24 the annual EU DisinfoLab Conference in Riga. And, in December 2024, we hosted a webinar for approximately 20 French NGOs on the Virtual Compute Environment.

As well as opportunities to share context about our approach, research interests, and opportunities to collaborate, these events enable us to learn from the important work being done by the research community on various topics, which include aspects related to harmful misinformation.