TikTok has disclosed that it removed over 3.6 million videos from Nigeria in the first quarter of 2025 for violating its community content policies, marking a 50% increase from the 2.4 million taken down in the previous quarter. The figure underscores the platform’s growing focus on safety, trust, and content integrity across its largest user bases.
The short-form video platform, owned by Bytedance, revealed this in its Q1 2025 Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, which showed a proactive detection rate of 98.4% in Nigeria, indicating most harmful content was identified and removed before users could report it. Additionally, 92.1% of these videos were removed within 24 hours, reflecting TikTok’s aggressive content moderation in the country.
In Nigeria alone, TikTok banned 42,196 LIVE rooms and interrupted 48,156 streams during the same period for breaching community guidelines. The company has also clarified its LIVE Monetization Guidelines, ensuring stricter enforcement on what qualifies for creator earnings, as part of its broader efforts to protect user experience.
On a regional level, the platform disclosed that in March 2025, it removed 129 accounts tied to covert operations across West Africa. These operations were flagged for attempting to manipulate discourse or spread misleading narratives.
Globally, TikTok deleted over 211 million videos, up from 153 million in the previous quarter, with more than 184 million of those removals driven by automation. The global proactive detection rate reached 99%, further affirming TikTok’s use of AI tools and real-time moderation to combat misinformation, hate speech, and other harmful material.
Efforts to curtail spam and fake engagement also ramped up, with 44.7 million fake comments and 4.3 billion fake likes removed between January and March 2025. These engagements were linked to automated or inauthentic mechanisms, which TikTok said continue to pose threats to platform integrity.
Despite these figures, TikTok insists that less than 1% of global content violates its policies. “We remain vigilant in our efforts to detect external threats… despite occasional fluctuations in metrics,” the company stated.
However, TikTok still faces legal scrutiny in the U.S., where 13 states and Washington, D.C. filed lawsuits accusing the platform of failing to protect minors and designing addictive software that endangers youth mental health. These lawsuits intensify regulatory pressure on the Chinese-owned app amid rising global concerns over algorithm-driven content and digital safety.