TikTok Releases Sixth Disinformation Transparency Report, Highlighting Enhanced Protections and Clearer Labels

TikTok Boosts Election Integrity Efforts Amid European Voting Season

TikTok has released its sixth Transparency Report under the EU Code of Conduct on Disinformation, highlighting significant improvements in election integrity, AI content labeling, and fact-checking during the first half of 2025. The report, which now falls under the Digital Services Act framework, covers 30 European countries with consistent methodology to ensure comparable trend analysis.

The platform ramped up protection measures during elections in Croatia, Germany, Poland, Portugal, and Romania, with a particular focus on tackling fake engagement. Enhanced detection systems led to increased removals of impersonation accounts, including nearly 3,000 accounts falsely representing government officials, politicians, and political parties.

“We’re seeing faster enforcement during critical election periods,” said Caroline Greer, TikTok’s Director of Public Policy and Government Relations in Brussels. The platform achieved a notable 15 percentage point increase in “zero-view removals” of content violating civic and election integrity policies, meaning 90% of such content was taken down before users could see it.

Romania’s presidential election annulment in December 2024 prompted TikTok to implement additional safeguards, building on experience gained from over 200 global elections since 2020. The company established a Mission Control Centre, allocated extra resources across teams, and responded rapidly to emerging risks. These efforts coincided with expanded fact-checking initiatives that drove in-app election centre page views to more than 2 million, doubling previous figures.

The platform also participated in an election stress test organized by the European Commission ahead of Germany’s federal elections and partnered with European fact-checkers on media literacy campaigns throughout the region.

On the AI transparency front, TikTok expanded Content Credentials certification (C2PA) to additional features and introduced a visible watermark for AI content created within the app. These measures contributed to more consistent content labeling, with creator-labeled AI videos increasing by 36% to over 8.7 million, while automatically labeled AI-generated content grew 81% to approximately 5.5 million.

More transparent AI identification appears to correlate with improved compliance, as policy-violating AI content removals decreased by 53% to fewer than 25,000, with views on removed AI content falling by 47%.

Fact-checking operations scaled significantly during the election-heavy first half of 2025. The number of videos reviewed by third-party fact-checkers more than doubled to 13,000. Improved detection systems helped surface potentially problematic content, resulting in an 80% increase in removals following fact-check assessments and a 123% rise in content removed from the recommendation algorithm in users’ For You feeds.

While appeal volumes increased in line with enforcement actions, the success rates for those appeals remained relatively stable, suggesting the platform maintained consistent policy enforcement despite handling larger volumes.

TikTok continued efforts against inauthentic behavior, with fake follower removals returning to historical norms while interventions against fake engagement metrics increased. The company also reported ongoing disruption of covert influence operations, details of which appear in their monthly disclosure reports.

Educational initiatives targeting hate speech showed improved results. The platform’s Holocaust education campaign achieved greater reach and engagement, with video interventions generating more impressions and clicks. Search prompts became more targeted and saw higher click-through rates following a refreshed in-app educational hub launched in January in partnership with UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress.

Researcher access to platform data also expanded, with increased applications and approvals for both Research Tools and the Commercial Content Library. The transparency measures mandated by the EU Code of Conduct attracted growing interest, with more researchers visiting the Transparency Centre and downloading available data during this period.

“Our focus remains steady,” Greer emphasized. “Protect elections and civic debate. Make AI content clearer with labels and watermarking. Work closely with fact-checkers and researchers. And keep improving the speed and precision of enforcement at scale.”

The full report is available in the TikTok Transparency Centre, offering additional metrics and insights into the platform’s content moderation efforts across European markets.