TikTok has publicly released its first-ever transparency report which comprises of a list of countries that made requests for accessing user information — a list that India tops — and removing content.
As per the report, users in India sent out a total of 107 requests for user data and 11 requests (8 of which were deemed to be emergency requests) to take down or restrict specific content on TikTok. 47% of all these requests were deemed to be right and acted upon by the platform.
While those numbers aren’t surprising given the ban saga we all witnessed in 2019, it is surprising that China or even Hong Kong doesn’t even feature in the report.
This could be because the Chinese version of TikTok, named Douyin, functions as a separate business entity under ByteDance but Hong Kong being absent from the report is a little odd. That’s particularly because it was only in November 2019 that we’d heard of TikTok censoring content related to the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, likely to appease the Chinese government. TikTok did vehemently deny those allegations but it did spiral into lawmakers in the US calling a probe on security grounds.
TikTok put out its first transparency report. Here are some of the top requests it received from Jan to June.
Legal requests for user ID:
India – 107
US – 79
Japan – 35Gov’t requests for content removal:
India – 11
US – 6
Japan – 3https://t.co/fEwK87c9lI— David Volodzko (@davidvolodzko) December 31, 2019
India is followed by the US in TikTok’s transparency report, sending out 79 requests for user data, along with six requests for content takedowns. TikTok says it complied with 86 per cent of the user data requests and restricted or blocked seven accounts related to the content takedown requests.
The platform also got 35 requests from Japan, 12 from Germany, 11 from Norway, 8 from France, 6 each from the UK, Sweden and South Korea, 5 from Australia, 3 each from Israel and Italy, 2 from Poland and one each from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Hungary, Iceland, Jordan, New Zealand, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland and Turkey.
The TikTok Transparency Report also lists government requests for content removal. India leads the way in this regard as well with 11 requests in the first 6 months of 2019. These requests also specified 9 TikTok accounts. The Bytedance-owned popular short video platform says 8 of these accounts were restricted or removed from TikTok, and 4 pieces of content were removed or restricted as well.
Eric Ebenstein, TikTok’s head of policy speaking about government requests and how they’re dealt with says, “We take any request from government bodies extremely seriously, and closely review each such request we receive to determine whether, for example, the request adheres to the required legal process or the content violates local law.”
