Yesterday, TikTok (www.TikTok.com), in partnership with AfricTivistes hosted its first West Africa Safety Summit in Dakar, Senegal, bringing together senior government officials, policy experts, NGO’s, regulators, media and industry leaders from varying West African nations and Sahel region. Delegates from Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Chad and even Ethiopia attended the Summit to collaborate on strengthening user safety and content moderation specific to the region’s challenges.
TikTok’s Outreach and Partnerships Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa, Duduzile Mkhize, emphasised the platform’s commitment to enhancing user security by gathering stakeholder insights and ideas.
“While global, we remain hyper-local in our every day efforts,” Mkhize stressed. “The dialogue at this Summit is invaluable because only through insights sharing and collaboration with policymakers and local partners across West Africa can we prevent a fragmented and insecure digital environment. United action can help us drive continued efforts for a safe space for our community to discover, create, and connect responsibly.”
One such pivotal partner is Senegal’s very own Aisha Dabo, a member of TikTok’s Sub-Saharan Africa Safety Advisory Council (SSA SAC). As a digital specialist with more than 20 years of experience, Dabo advocates for active digital citizenship as a means for building a secure online environment across the continent through the organisation she co-founded, AfricTivistes. Reflecting on her influence on the TikTok Safety Advisory Council and local expertise, Dabo said:
“I’ve seen firsthand how local knowledge can shape global policy in meaningful ways. This summit is an opportunity to highlight African-led solutions to digital challenges and ensure that our regional realities and perspectives are central to global safety discussions. It’s about building an open, inclusive and secure internet—one that truly reflects the diversity and resilience of our continent.”
West Africa in Numbers: Content Removals
In its latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report (https://apo-opa.co/4r8GfHp), TikTok demonstrated the combined strength of its automated moderation technology and expert human teams, which work closely to swiftly detect and remove harmful content before users are impacted.
Since January 2024, TikTok has removed more than 34 million videos across Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone. This proportion of violative videos averages 0.6% of all content published across the region. In TikTok’s latest report, covering April to June 2025 (Q22025), removals alone totalled 8.3 million. TikTok’s investment in technology ensures proactive moderation, where 87% of all removals during this period were made through automated detection systems.
In March 2025, TikTok proactively identified and disrupted covert Influence operations (https://apo-opa.co/4ie94hw) with accounts targeting political discourse in West Africa and France. This network operated from Togo, consisting of 129 accounts. The individuals behind this network created inauthentic accounts in order to undermine France’s foreign policies in West Africa.
In Senegal specifically, the platform has removed over 2.5 million videos between Q1 2024 and Q2 2025, highlighting its dedicated local enforcement efforts. Over 16,000 TikTok LIVE sessions were interrupted in the same period.
Global Removal Rate for Second Quarter of 2025
In the second quarter of 2025, over 189 million videos were removed worldwide, representing just 0.7% of all content uploaded. 99.1% of these removals were detected proactively, 94.4% were taken down within 24 hours, and 163.9 million videos were automatically removed by AI-driven moderation systems. To help protect TikTok’s integrity, in this quarter, the platform has removed 76,991,660 fake accounts, along with the additional 25,904,708 accounts that were suspected to be under the age of 13.
By integrating advanced automated moderation technologies with the expertise of thousands of trust and safety professionals, TikTok enables faster and consistent removal of content that violates its Community Guidelines (https://apo-opa.co/4r9L2rT). This approach is vital in mitigating the damaging effects of misinformation, hate speech, and other violative content material on the platform.
TikTok LIVE : Strengthening Real-Time Safety
For the first time, we’re sharing data related to our actions to enforce our LIVE monetization guidelines. These guidelines help reward creators who stream safe, authentic, and high-quality content, while preventing streams that go against these guidelines. In the second quarter of 2025, we took action, including warnings and demonetization, on 2,321,813 LIVE sessions and 1,040,356 LIVE creators for violating our LIVE monetization guidelines. Warnings serve as an opportunity to educate creators when their content may breach LIVE monetisation policies (https://apo-opa.co/4rbze8u), allowing them to make necessary changes.
For more information on TikTok’s safety policies and initiatives, visit our Safety Centre (https://apo-opa.co/480Arbz). Distributed by APO Group on behalf of TikTok.
