Transparency Center

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.

Download PDF

Commitment 30

Relevant Signatories commit to establish a framework for transparent, structured, open, financially sustainable, and non-discriminatory cooperation between them and the EU fact-checking community regarding resources and support made available to fact-checkers.

We signed up to the following measures of this commitment

Measure 30.1 Measure 30.2 Measure 30.3 Measure 30.4

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

Onboarded two new fact-checking partners in wider Europe:
- Albania & Kosovo: Internews Kosova
- Georgia: Fact Check Georgia.
In H2 we also expanded our fact-checking coverage to other wider-European and EU candidate countries with existing fact-checking partners:
- Moldova: AFP/Reuters
- Serbia: Lead Stories
Continued to expand our fact-checking repository to ensure our teams and systems leverage the full scope of insights our fact-checking partners submitted to TikTok (regardless of the original language of the relevant content).
Continued to conduct feedback sessions with our partners to further enhance the efficiency of the fact-checking program.
Continued to participate in the working group within the Code framework on the creation of an external fact-checking repository.

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?

If yes, which further implementation measures do you plan to put in place in the next 6 months?

Measure 30.1

Relevant Signatories will set up agreements between them and independent fact-checking organisations (as defined in whereas (e)) to achieve fact-checking coverage in all Member States. These agreements should meet high ethical and professional standards and be based on transparent, open, consistent and non-discriminatory conditions and will ensure the independence of fact-checkers.

QRE 30.1.1

Relevant Signatories will report on and explain the nature of their agreements with fact-checking organisations; their expected results; relevant quantitative information (for instance: contents fact-checked, increased coverage, changes in integration of fact-checking as depends on the agreements and to be further discussed within the Task-force); and such as relevant common standards and conditions for these agreements.

Within Europe, we work with 14 fact-checking partners who provide fact-checking coverage in 23 EEA languages, including at least one official language of every EU Member State, plus Georgian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian. Our partners have teams of fact-checkers who review and verify reported content. Our moderators then use that independent feedback to take action and where appropriate, remove or make ineligible for recommendation false or misleading content or label unverified content.

Our agreements with our partners are standardised, meaning the agreements are based on our template master services agreements and consistent of common standards and conditions. We reviewed and updated our template standard agreements as part of our annual contract renewal process.

The terms of the agreements describe:

The service the fact-checking partner will provide, namely that their team of fact checkers review, assess and rate video content uploaded to their fact-checking queue.
The expected results e.g., the fact-checkers advise on whether the content may be or contain misinformation and rate it using our classification categories.
An option to agree that our fact-checker partners provide regular written reports about disinformation trends identified.
An option to receive pro-actively flagging of potential harmful misinformation from our partners.
The languages in which they will provide fact-checking services.
The ability to request temporary coverage regarding additional languages or support on ad hoc additional projects.
All other key terms including the applicable term and fees and payment arrangements.

QRE 30.1.2

Relevant Signatories will list the fact-checking organisations they have agreements with (unless a fact-checking organisation opposes such disclosure on the basis of a reasonable fear of retribution or violence).

We currently have 14 IFCN accredited fact-checking partners across the EU, EEA, and wider Europe:

Agence France-Presse (AFP)
dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Demagog
Facta
Fact Check Georgia
Faktograf
Internews Kosova
Lead Stories
Logically Facts
Newtral
Poligrafo
Reuters
Science Feedback
Teyit

These partners provide fact-checking coverage in 23 official EEA languages, including at least one official language of each EU Member States, plus Georgian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

We can, and have, put in place temporary agreements with these fact-checking partners to provide additional EU language coverage during high risk events like elections or an unfolding crisis. For example, we temporarily expanded our fact-checking coverage to Maltese for the EU Parliamentary Election of June 2024.

Outside of our fact-checking program, we also collaborate with fact-checking organisations to develop a variety of media literacy campaigns. For example, during this reporting period, we partnered with a number of fact-checking organisations on election specific media literacy campaigns:

Austria: Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa)
Croatia: Faktograf
France: Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Georgia: Fact Check Georgia
Germany (regional elections): Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa)
Germany (federal election): Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa)
Ireland: The Journal
Moldova: StopFals!
Romania: Funky Citizens

We also rolled out two new ongoing general media literacy and critical thinking skills campaigns in the EU and two in EU candidate countries in collaboration with our fact-checking and media literacy partners:

France: Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Portugal: Polígrafo
Georgia: Fact Check Georgia
Moldova: StopFals!

Globally, we have 22 IFCN-accredited fact-checking partners. We are continuously working to expand our fact-checking network and we keep users updated here.

QRE 30.1.3

Relevant Signatories will report on resources allocated where relevant in each of their services to achieve fact-checking coverage in each Member State and to support fact-checking organisations' work to combat Disinformation online at the Member State level.

We have fact-checking coverage in 23 official EEA languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

We have fact-checking coverage in a number of other European languages or languages which affect European users, including Georgian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian and we can request additional support in Azeri, Armenian, and Belarusian.

In terms of global fact-checking initiatives, we currently cover more than 50 languages and assess content in more than 100 countries, thereby improving the overall integrity of the service and benefiting European users.

In order to effectively scale the feedback provided by our fact-checkers globally, we have implemented the measures listed below.

Fact-checking repository. We have built a repository of previously fact-checked claims to help misinformation moderators make swift and accurate decisions.
Trends reports. Our fact-checking partners can provide us with regular reports identifying general misinformation trends observed on our platform and across the industry generally, including new/changing industry or market trends, events or topics that generated particular misinformation or disinformation.
Proactive detection by our fact-checking partners. Our fact-checking partners are authorised to proactively identify content that may constitute harmful misinformation on our platform and suggest prominent misinformation that is circulating online that may benefit from verification.
Fact-checking guidelines. We create guidelines and trending topic reminders for our moderators on the basis of previous fact-checking assessments. This ensures our moderation teams leverage the insights from our fact-checking partners and helps our moderators make swift and accurate decisions on flagged content regardless of the language in which the original claim was made.
Election Speaker Series. To further promote election integrity, and inform our approach to country-level EU elections, we invited suitably qualified local and regional external experts to share their insights and market expertise with our internal teams. Our recent Election Speaker Series heard presentations from the following organisations:
- France: Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Germany: German Press Agency (dpa)
Austria: German Press Agency (dpa)
Lithuania: Logically Facts
Romania: Funky Citizens
Ireland: Logically Facts
Croatia: Faktograf
Georgia: FactCheck Georgia
Moldova: Stop Fals!

Members of moderation teams receive specialised training on misinformation and have direct access to these tools and measures, which enables them to more accurately take action on violating content across Europe and globally.

We are continuing to invest in building, and improving, models which may allow for the output of these measures to be used to update the machine learning models we use in proactive detection, learning, over time, to search for similar content which can be proactively recalled into our moderation system for review. We use a variety of automated tools, including:

Computer Vision models, which help to detect objects so it can be determined whether the content likely contains material which violates our policies.
Keyword lists and models are used to review text and audio content to detect material in violation of our policies. We work with various external experts, including our fact-checking partners, to inform our keyword lists.
Where we have previously detected content that violates our policies, we use de-duplication and hashing technologies that enable us to recognise copies or near copies of such content to prevent further re-distribution of violative content on our platform.
We launched the ability to read Content Credentials that attach metadata to content, which we can use to automatically label AI-generated content that originated on other major platforms.

Continuing to leverage the fact-checking output in this way enables us to further increase the positive impact of our fact checking programme.