The beauty of TikTok is that it is designed for everyone to be heard. If you have good content that resonates with people, they will see your video. It’s not only the users who are already famous who can grow their platform here—TikTok gives everyone a voice.

About 10 years ago, I met these founders who were building a very cool app. The idea behind it was interesting. Let’s recommend content to people based not on who they knew, but on their genuine interests. They were small then—a team of 30. But I became a user of TikTok and really connected with what it was trying to do. It brought joy to a lot of people, and that was something I was drawn to.

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Clearly we prioritize safety very seriously, as you can imagine. And some of it could be us being overly protective, a mis-moderation leaning on the side of being careful. Sometimes we have taken something down as an abundance of caution. The position of moderation is very important. It’s not only getting the violation rates down, it’s reducing overmoderation, which happens. It’s a price you have to pay, and you have to find the right balance.

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I think as long as there have been rules, there have been people trying to bypass the rules. I think what is really important is to make sure that the spirit of what we’re trying to do is well understood, and the spirit is, “Look, we’re trying to create a platform for creativity and for joy.”

The overarching thing that we’re trying to do here is to keep the community safe and inclusive for everybody. There’s always freedom for users to express themselves if it doesn’t violate any of our guidelines. As you can imagine, this is a very complex role, and our trust and safety team is always looking into making sure that the content on the platform is not violative.

Fans want to know how the music is made. They want to know about the thought process, the creative process. And this is the key thing. They don’t want this to be overproduced. They want this to be super authentic. And one of the key things that you will find on TikTok is that most of the content, everything I just told you about, has to be really authentic. If you try to make it very polished or very refined, it’s not going to be that organic. People will see through this.

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Oh, who am I? I grew up in Singapore. I was born there, my great-grandfather moved there many years ago. I had a typical Singaporean childhood. I wanted to see the world, because Singapore is fantastic, but it’s tiny. So I went to the UK for college. I joined Goldman Sachs, worked there for a couple of years, met an internet entrepreneur who started an investment company to invest in Facebook. So I joined him, and through that I met the guy who founded ByteDance. And in his earliest iteration, the idea was so simple, but so powerful.

When it comes to protecting our community, we know there’s no finish line. The industry as a whole faces dynamic and ever-evolving challenges. We will always work to deploy our teams, tools, and resources to meet them and to demonstrate our hard work and transparency.

People come to TikTok to feel inspired, be creative, and watch uplifting content. It is not the platform of choice for individuals seeking to engage in harmful conduct. However, we also realize that threats to online platform safety are far from static. Content moderation, which is a core element of platform safety, is an exceptionally complicated, dynamic, and constantly evolving process.