In the second quarter of 2025, the short-form video platform TikTok revealed that it had removed nearly 600,000 videos in Kenya for breaches of its community guidelines.
According to the company’s quarterly Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, 92.9% of those videos were taken down before any user viewed them, and 96.3% were removed within 24 hours of being posted.
The local removals follow a rising trend, with over 450,000 videos removed in the first quarter of 2025 and more than 360,000 in the same quarter last year, as TikTok works to curb harmful content in one of its most active African markets.
The increased moderation in Kenya comes amid growing regulatory pressure. In March 2025, the Communications Authority of Kenya issued five formal demands to TikTok after a BBC investigation exposed that the platform had failed to prevent minors from being exploited in sexualized live streams.
CA required the platform to remove sexual content involving minors, investigate how offensive content continued to slip through its systems, explain its moderation failures, and strengthen digital safety education for the public.
READ: TikTok Bans 43,000 Accounts as Content Warnings Rise in Kenya
Globally during the same reporting period, TikTok removed more than 189 million videos, representing about 0.7% of all uploaded content. Of these global removals, 99.1% were detected proactively before user reports.
94.4% were removed within 24 hours, and 163.9 million videos were taken down automatically through AI-powered moderation tools.
The company also removed 77 million fake accounts and 26 million accounts suspected to belong to users under the age of 13, showing a tightening grip on platform integrity and youth safety.
TikTok states that the removal of rule-breaking content is “vital in mitigating the damaging effects of misinformation, hate speech, and other violative behavior on the platform.”
The latest Kenyan numbers therefore provide a clear indication that the company is not only scaling its operations but also responding directly to oversight from regulators concerned about the safety of young internet users.
