TikTok Clean Sweeping 33.6 Million Fake Accounts This Year

TikTok again proves to the world that its platform is fully responsible for its content moderators (photo: doc. tiktok)

JAKARTA - TikTok has again proven to the world that its platform is fully responsible for its content moderators and users, by successfully deleting a malicious fake account.

Published by TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, Community Guideline Enforcement Reports covering April 1 to June 30 this year, the report includes many reported data points around the removal of fake videos and accounts.

In its report, 33.6 million fake accounts for the second quarter of this year have been removed, representing an increase of 61 percent from 20.8 million accounts removed in the previous quarter.

Further to Q2 which compared to last year showed the deletion rate of fake TikTok accounts grew by more than 2,000 percent over 12 months.

TikTok says the purpose of the fake account varies, but generally claims to be someone or like celebrities, political figures, brands, and other scammers with malicious intent.

But from the report, it appears that fake account deletion has increased, the number of spam accounts blocked at the registration stage has dropped drastically, down from around 202 million during Q1 to around 75 million.

Of course, that's not a coincidence. TikTok said it had implemented measures to prevent bad actors from fake accounts from knowing about TikTok's detection capabilities.

In short, TikTok has allowed more spam or fake accounts to the platform, but eventually removed more after they were active.

Others, TikTok also removed a proactive video which (where they deleted content before it was reported) rose from 83.6 percent in Q1 to 89.1 percent in Q2, while the deleted video in less than 24 hours (from the time the report was received) increased from 71.9 percent to 83.9 percent.

As information quoted from TechCrunch, Thursday, September 29, TikTok itself has been forced to have content moderators to prevent everything from political fraud to vaccine misinformation.

The company is also trying to improve its capabilities by banning the spread of fake videos and removing misinformation. Recently, TikTok also launched a part-time Election Center in the app, and sharing further plans about how they will combat misinformation.