TikTok, a short video platform owned by Bytedance, has revealed that it erased 1.4 million videos uploaded by Nigerian users, over an alleged company policy violations in the third quarter of 2023.
The company made this disclosure through its recently published Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, which revealed that it expunged 73.6 million accounts that were discovered to be scam accounts or spam during the period under review.
Additionally, 348.7 million likes on videos were deleted in the same clean sweep.
The company added that 7.2 billion fake follow requests and 211.3 million fake followers were erased in total.
TikTok had found that the expunged likes, followers, and follow requests were the consequence of “automated or fake mechanisms.”
“As always, we’re considering outside threats and taking preventive measures to safeguard the platform from fraudulent accounts and activity. There are constant variations in the reported metrics in these regions due to these attackers’ continual probing and attacking of our systems.
Despite this, we’re unwavering in our decision to rapidly detect and erase any accounts, materials, or actions that aim to manipulate users’ popularity on our platform.” TikTok stated.