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Thank you for your email dated 6 June 2024, inviting TikTok to respond to an article in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and a post on the Verfassungsblog forum regarding platforms’ Digital Services Act (DSA) compliance. We appreciate the opportunity to respond and share about our DSA efforts. We are committed to keeping our community safe, and through continued close collaboration with industry partners, regulators, and civil society, we strive to embrace the spirit of transparency and user empowerment that the DSA sets out to deliver to people across Europe.

Significant time, resources, and thought went into the design and implementation of TikTok's illegal content reporting, emphasizing ease of use and access and building upon the reporting mechanisms that were already in place (and which users are most familiar with). We are comfortable that our reporting mechanisms meet the obligations under the DSA, with illegal content reporting having equal prominence and accessibility to our existing Community Guidelines reporting channels.

Indeed, to make it as easy as possible for our community to understand the changes brought by the DSA, we launched a new European Online Safety Hub available in multiple EU languages to serve as a 'one-stop-shop' guide to TikTok's DSA compliance. The Safety Hub includes comprehensive and user-friendly guidance that helps users understand how to report suspected illegal content and explains our review process. We are unaware of other platforms making similar resources available to users.

In particular, understanding that illegal content reporting is likely unfamiliar to many users, the guidance explains each of the available illegal content reporting categories and, importantly, the steps users can take to help us assess their reports.

Respectfully, we do not agree with the implication that content reported under TikTok's Community Guidelines results in lesser protection for users - this is simply not the case. TikTok's Community Guidelines provide comprehensive and effective protections to users and are robustly enforced. [...]