TikTok reaffirms commitment to safety with new Community Guidelines

TikTok has announced their refreshed Community Guidelines, reaffirming their commitment to safety. TikTok’s Community Guidelines are the rules and standards for being part of the TikTok community which apply to everyone and everything on the platform. As a part of this announcement, the platform is also introducing TikTok’s Community Principles.

The Community Principles will help users and the wider community to better understand the decisions about how the platform works to keep TikTok a safe place for users. These principles are based on TikTok’s commitment to uphold human rights and aligned with international legal frameworks. These principles guide TikTok’s decisions about how they moderate content, so that the platform can strive to be fair in their actions, protect human dignity, and strike a balance between freedom of expression and preventing harm.

To inform the most comprehensive updates to TikTok’s Community Guidelines to date, the platform consulted more than 100 organisations around the world, including International Association for Suicide Prevention, and regionally with the Safety Advisory Council and SMEX in addition to members of their community. Their input helped TikTok to strengthen their rules and respond to new threats and potential harms. Some of the key changes are:

TikTok is advancing their rules for how they treat synthetic media, which is content created or modified by AI technology;

TikTok is adding ‘tribe’ as a protected attribute in their hate speech and hateful behaviour policies;

The platform will provide more detail about their work to protect civic and election integrity, including their approach to government, politician and political party accounts.

TikTok’s new Community Guidelines will take effect on April 21 and will provide additional training to their moderators in order to help enforce these updated rules and standards effectively.