Europol and EU leads removal of over 2,000 terrorist content posts on TikTok

Europol’s European Counter Terrorism Centre and Spain, along with other EU countries, flagged over 2,000 posts of terrorist and violent extremist content to TikTok for review against their terms of service in late September as part of a Referral Action Day (RAD), an ongoing public-private partnership exercise meant to counter terrorist content and prevent online radicalisation.

In reporting the latest effort against this content, Spanish outlet Newtral cites a 2023 ISD investigation on terrorist glorification content on TikTok. In the Dispatch, Ciaran O’Connor and Melanie Smith outline how “shockingly easy” it was to find content glorifying terrorism on the platform, despite ISD having reported about this type of content, the circumvention methods and platform failures to TikTok back in 2021. The article uses the study as a source to point out how terrorist and violent extremist content continue to prevail on the platform, failing to be removed for weeks and months at a time, and TikTok’s failures in enforcing its most basic policies against violent and graphic content.