Although the popular social media platform TikTok hadn’t always been the most transparent about its user numbers in specific countries – only regional data was available, now having to comply with the Digital Services Act, they recently released updated user numbers in the European Union.
The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act were enacted by the European Union to create a safer digital space where the fundamental rights of users are protected and also to establish a level playing field for businesses. To comply with the DSA, social platforms, such as TikTok need to regularly update their user numbers in the region, which means we can expect a similar report each month. TikTok released its latest monthly report, not just with active user numbers, but with their principles and numbers of content moderation, reporting of illegal content and for example their approach to orders from government authorities. The report contains data on types of policies that content was removed upon, and numbers of instances specific to EU countries when content was removed based on orders from governments.
The report also includes a map with “monthly active recipients” in the European Union, based on that we also prepared a graph which show the share of active recipients in the whole population – in Central and Eastern European countries. This all can be a useful tool to agencies and companies in content planning for the platform.
In this report, TikTok also detailed its content moderation and how teams operate: they have an estimated 6125 moderators who are dedicated to moderating content within the European Union. This numbers includes 395 non-language specific moderators, who review profiles or photos, and they also list the number of language moderators.
The report states: “our moderators often have linguistic expertise across multiple languages. Where our moderators have linguistic expertise in more than one European Union language, that expertise is reflected in the detailed language breakdown below. For example, the Czech, Slovakian and Slovenian languages are grouped under one category within our Trust & Safety team and are moderated by the same moderators. The moderators allocated for the Croatian language also cover the Serbian language.”
