TikTok, the popular short-form video platform owned by Bytedance, announced the deletion of 1.7 million videos from Nigerian users in the fourth quarter of 2023.

The platform attributed this action to violations of its Community Guidelines, noting Nigeria's presence among the top 50 countries for such policy breaches during Q4.

The development comes at the back of the platform's legislative issues with the United States government.

Globally, 176.5 million videos were removed during this period, with the top 50 offending markets responsible for about 90% of these removals.

These deleted videos were found to contravene TikTok's policies on integrity, authenticity, privacy, security, mental health, behavioural standards, safety, and civility, among others. According to The Sun, TikTok disclosed the removal of 169 million accounts identified as spam or fake during the same reporting period.

TikTok stated: “From October 7 through to the end of 2023, we removed more than 169 million fake accounts globally, and we have removed about 1.2 million bot comments on content tagged with hashtags related to the Israel-Hamas war.”

“We remain vigilant in our efforts to detect external threats and safeguard the platform from fake accounts and engagement. These threats persistently probe and attack our systems, leading to occasional fluctuations in the reported metrics within these areas."