TikTok has removed 2.4 million videos from Nigeria in the last quarter of 2024 for breaching its content policies.
The social media giant, in its latest Community Guidelines Enforcement report, placed Nigeria among the top 50 countries with the highest number of violations.
The scale of enforcement was global—153 million videos were taken down in total. The United States topped the list with 8.5 million videos deleted.
TikTok stated that these takedowns were necessary to maintain platform integrity, covering violations related to misinformation, privacy breaches, security risks, and harmful behaviour.
Alongside video removals, TikTok also deleted 211.5 million accounts in the same period. The majority—185.3 million—were classified as fake. Another 20.5 million accounts belonged to users suspected to be under 13, violating TikTok’s age restrictions. An additional 5.6 million accounts were shut down for unspecified reasons.
“We remain vigilant in our efforts to detect external threats and safeguard the platform from fake accounts and engagement. These threats persistently probe and attack our systems, leading to occasional fluctuations in the reported metrics,” the report stated.
TikTok also revealed updates to its detection system for fake likes and followers, increasing the accuracy of its enforcement initiatives. These changes, it claimed, better reflect the scale of current moves to remove manipulated engagement on the platform.
Despite its aggressive enforcement, TikTok is still under investigation, particularly in the United States. In October 2024, 13 U.S. states, along with Washington D.C., filed lawsuits against the platform. They accused TikTok of failing to protect young users and deliberately designing its app to be addictive.
The lawsuits argue that the platform exploits children’s vulnerabilities to maximise profits, further fuelling talks about its impact on mental health. Plaintiffs are seeking financial penalties and demanding stricter regulations to hold the company accountable.
