TikTok's crackdown on influencers: A step towards user safety

TikTok encourages community participation through user reporting and education, helping to keep the platform safe for all. 

Users have ensured that they utilize the tools at their disposal to report the South African influencers who participated in promoting the Alabuga Start programme.

According to reports, in October last year, the programme targeted women from Central and East African countries to work in a Russian factory.

Clayson Monyela, Head of Public Diplomacy at the Department of International Relations, issued a warning, urging young people to be cautious.

A general search on TikTok for the accounts of influencers Cyan Boujee and Siyamthanda Anita has their names not popping up.

Users are able to report an account for violating TikTok Community Guidelines. Violations of our Community Guidelines might include: impersonating another account, creating an unsafe environment on TikTok, or posting sensitive and mature themes. 

TikTok is committed to user safety in South Africa. In the first quarter of 2025, more than 1.1 million videos were removed for breaching platform rules. This is a 17% increase in removals compared to videos removed in the last three months of 2024.

Almost all (99.6%) violating content in these first three months of the year was proactively removed before someone needed to report it.

94.3% of violations were removed within 24 hours, highlighting the speed and efficiency of TikTok’s combined moderation approach, using technology and human moderators. 

TikTok’s Community Guidelines Enforcement Report for Q1 of 2025 also highlighted the removal of more than 107,000 accounts in the country for breaching the platform's rules.

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