Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

About this report

Child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), including the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), is abhorrent and strictly prohibited on TikTok. When our Child Safety Team becomes aware of CSEA, whether through our own proactive detection methods, community reporting, or industry partnerships, we take immediate action to remove it, permanently ban accounts, and submit reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). If a law enforcement agency initiates a further investigation and requires additional information from TikTok, we evaluate and respond to these requests in line with our Law Enforcement Guidelines.

CSEA reports are managed by our dedicated Child Safety Team. With backgrounds in youth protection and well-being, law enforcement, analytics, and forensic investigations, the team is highly experienced in the detection, assessment and handling of CSEA. This specialized team also works to ensure that the reports we submit to NCMEC contain quality information that can be utilized by law enforcement. For more information on our comprehensive approach, please see Combating child sexual exploitation and abuse.

While NCMEC already discloses the aggregate number of CyberTips received from service providers annually, this report provides further insight into our work to identify and report instances of CSEA.

Terminology

• Account Bans for CSEA Violations: TikTok has a zero tolerance policy for CSEA and will permanently ban accounts involved in these violations. This includes child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming, child sex trafficking, pedophilia, sextortion, and sexual solicitation, and sexual harassment of young people under the age of 18. Account bans for CSEA violations include those accounts that were submitted in the reports made to NCMEC that were also permanently banned from TikTok.
• Number of CyberTipline Reports made to NCMEC: Each submission may contain multiple pieces of content or additional relevant contextual information. NCMEC triages these submissions for dissemination to global law enforcement agencies, including additional reports escalated by TikTok highlighting severe cases of child sexual abuse. This number captures the total number of reports submitted by TikTok.
• Total content reported to NCMEC: A CyberTipline report made to NCMEC may contain information identifying the responsible user, the minor victim, and the illicit content, along with contextual details. This number represents the total number of unique pieces of content included within the reports made to NCMEC.