The U.S. had the largest volume of videos removed from TikTok during the second half of 2020, the company has said.
Between July 1 and December 31 last year a total of 11,775,777 videos were removed that originated in the United States—which was more than any other country according to statistics revealed inside a transparency report published on Wednesday.
Following the U.S. was Pakistan (8,215,633), Brazil (7,506,599), Russia (4,574,690) and Indonesia (3,860,156), TikTok said in the new report.
On the global scale, TikTok said more than 89 million videos were removed for violating guidelines or terms of service in the second half of 2020. Showing the vast scale of the app, that amounted to less than one percent of all videos uploaded on TikTok.
Of those 89 million videos, the company said more than 92 percent had been removed before a user reported them. More than 83 percent had been pulled before receiving any views, and 93.5 percent were taken offline within 24 hours of being posted.
While the report does not provide a U.S.-specific breakdown, the reasons mostly cited for TikTok video removals had been minor safety (36 percent), adult nudity and sexual activities (20.5 percent) and illegal activities and regulated goods (17.9 percent).
The rest of the reasons—graphic content, harassment and bullying, hateful behavior and violent extremism—were each under 10 percent of reports, Tiktok said.
TikTok has approximately 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. and has become synonymous with viral online trends, quirky dances and short form video content. It has remained dominant despite fresh competition from Facebook and Snapchat.
As of Wednesday, TikTok was top of the iOS store's free category, and was the second most popular app on Google Play, according to statistics from App Annie.
Analytics company Sensor Tower stated in a blog post last December that TikTok had surpassed 2.6 billion installs globally and had the most amount of "positive reviews among the top 10 most downloaded iOS apps in the United States during 2020."
According to the transparency report, it removed over 6.1 million accounts for violating terms in the second half of last year. In addition, more than nine million spam accounts were purged, alongside 5,225,800 spam videos posted by those accounts.
It said it stopped 173,246,894 accounts from being made using "automated means," suggesting people were attempting to create bot accounts on the platform.
Addressing misinformation, which has emerged as a major issue facing social networks, TikTok said that 347,225 videos were removed in the U.S. for "election misinformation, disinformation, or manipulated media" throughout the second half of 2020.
On top of that, it removed 51,505 videos during that time period for promoting COVID misinformation. TikTok said: "Of those videos, 86 percent were removed before they were reported to us, 87 percent were removed within 24 hours of being uploaded."
