#TikTok removes thousands of European coronavirus videos: report

TikTok says it took down some 29,000 coronavirus videos in Europe from January to June as it worked to control bogus information about the pandemic.

The affected videos — about 3,000 of which contained “medical misinformation” — violated the popular app’s rules that prohibit false information that could be harmful to people’s health, according to a Friday blog post from TikTok honcho Theo Bertram.

But Bertram indicated that COVID-19 misinformation has not run rampant among the platform’s European users. The number of virus-related videos that violated TikTok’s rules peaked in March before falling in April, May and June, he said.

“Based on our analysis, our overall conclusion is that we have seen low levels of content that violated our Community Guidelines related to Covid-19 in Europe,” wrote Bertram, who is TikTok’s director of government relations and public policy in Europe. CNBC first reported on the blog post Friday.

Bertram also touted TikTok’s efforts to share accurate information about the pandemic in partnership with public health authorities.

For instance, TikTok has added a “banner” linking to verified information about COVID-19 to more than 7 million videos in Europe since January that have words, hashtags or music related to the virus, according to Bertram. And an informational page with guidance from the World Health Organization has racked up more than 52 million visits across the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, he said.

Other social-media giants including Facebook and YouTube have cracked down on coronavirus misinformation by banning content spreading conspiracy theories about the disease.

TikTok removed about 49.2 million videos for violating its community guidelines from July to December of last year, which represents less than 1 percent of all the clips uploaded, according to a transparency report the company released last week.