Who owns TikTok? Company announces update to its moderation policy, follows in YouTube's footsteps
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Short-form video-sharing platform TikTok on February 2, announced that it has introduced something similar to YouTube's 'strike' feature, wherein an account violating its community guidelines could be permanently banned. "Under the new system, if someone posts content that violates one of our Community Guidelines, the account will accrue a strike as the content is removed," read the statement by TikTok.
The social media platform, which has often courted controversy, also informed that the nature of these strikes falls under various categories. If an account meets the threshold of strikes within either a product feature or policy, it will be permanently banned by the platform. As TikTok's new community guidelines come into force, here's everything you need to know about the company.
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Who owns TikTok?
With over one billion active users, across 154 countries, TikTok is arguably the most popular video-sharing app in the world today. However, the popular social media platform was not always called TikTok; in fact, the name was an attempt by its parent company, ByteDance, to cater to a more global audience, which might have been a little more difficult if it stuck to its original name, "Douyin".
ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing, China, was founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming and offers a host of other products and services apart from TikTok, including news and information content platform Toutiao and virtual reality headset PICO. In 2016, it launched 'Douyin,' a short-video app for users in China. Within a year of its launch, Douyin became one of the most talked about apps in the Chinese market, garnering over 100 million users who were posting about a billion videos each day. In 2017, Douyin was rebranded and launched as TikTok for the international market. The same year, ByteDance also purchased Musical.ly, for an estimated value of $1 billion, leading to the creation of TikTok as we know it today. Presently both apps — Douyin and TikTok — exist and function independently from each other.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming was named in 2013's China '30 Under 30' list by Forbes, and in 2018, he was included in Fortune magazine's '40 Under 40' list. However, Zhang resigned as CEO of Bytedance in May 2021 and as chairman in November 2021, reportedly under pressure from the Chinese government, as per Forbes. Presently, ByteDance co-founder Liang Rubo serves as the company's CEO and Lidong Zhang serves as its chairman.
More about TikTok's 'strikes' policy and updated account enforcement rules
Earlier, TikTok's account enforcement system had room to temporarily ban accounts from posting or commenting. While the parameters were in place, they were not streamlined. TikTok informed in a release that their current approach had the possibility of disproportionately impacting creators "who rarely and unknowingly violate a policy, while potentially being less efficient at deterring those who repeatedly violate them." TikTok stated, "Repeat violators tend to follow a pattern – our analysis has found that almost 90% violate using the same feature consistently, and over 75% violate the same policy category repeatedly."
To avoid this, TikTok has updated its account moderation system, allowing it to implement account strikes, similar to YouTube’s community guidelines strikes. "Under the new system, if someone posts content that violates one of our Community Guidelines, the account will accrue a strike as the content is removed. If an account meets the threshold of strikes within either a product feature (i.e. Comments, LIVE) or policy (i.e. Bullying and Harassment), it will be permanently banned. Those policy thresholds can vary depending on a violation's potential to cause harm to our community members – for example, there may be a stricter threshold for violating our policy against promoting hateful ideologies, than for sharing low-harm spam," TikTok informed. Strikes will expire from an account's record after a 90-day period.