TikTok removes over 7.2m accounts ‘potentially’ owned by underage users

Short-video app TikTok said it has removed over 7.2 million accounts “potentially” owned by users under the age of 13.

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According to the ByteDance-owned company’s community guidelines enforcement report for the first quarter of the year, the banned accounts were part of the 11.1 million accounts that were removed from the app for violating its community guidelines or terms of service.

These represented less than 1% of all accounts on TikTok.

While TikTok bars anyone under the age of 13 from creating accounts as per the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of the US, many children fake their age to get on board the popular social media platform.

In addition to the barred accounts, TikTok also took down almost 62 million videos, which make up a very small fraction of videos uploaded to the platform, on similar grounds. More than 71 million accounts were prevented from being created through automation.

“To bring more visibility to the actions we take to protect minors, in this report, we added the number of accounts removed from the full TikTok experience for potentially belonging to an underage person,” the company said in a statement.

The report comes after TikTok faced backlash during the past year amid safety concerns, especially when it comes to minors. Since then, the company has introduced measures to help bolster security, including the launch of a “for kids” section on the app and a change in the default privacy setting for users aged 15 and below.