Brand Safety at TikTok: Partnering for Progress

Brand Safety has a been a guiding principle for TikTok over this past year, and our dedication to building a safe platform for users and businesses is ongoing. In this fourth installment of our detailed look into TikTok’s Pillars of Brand Safety, we explore the importance of partnerships and how they help eliminate technology gaps and create a powerful safety net for both brands and users on the TikTok platform.

Partnerships have the power to amplify creativity, deepen insight, and build a more holistic approach with a broad spectrum of perspectives. We’ve partnered with several influential local and global organizations to help inform our policies, practices and products—and to enhance our solutions for brands.

Partnerships to promote user safety

Building a platform that is safe for brands first means building a platform that’s safe for every day users. Over the last year, TikTok has made great strides in developing partnerships that help promote and sustain a safe environment for all users on the TikTok platform.

TikTok Advisory Councils

TikTok Advisory Councils include leaders from academia and civil society who have a broad range of expertise in safety and technology, from cyber wellness and mental health to disinformation and the protection of minors. These groups help shape our content moderation policies and practices, answering today’s challenges while also looking forward to future issues that our industry may face.

We understand that the details of policies and practices can be different from one community to the next. To help accommodate these differences, we have established regional advisory councils to help inform safety and cyber wellness initiatives in targeted areas around the globe. We currently have Advisory Councils in the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Brazil and Latin America.

Third-party partnerships

TikTok also collaborates with an array of third-party organizations to improve our educational efforts and performance. These partnerships include government agencies, NGOs and outside consultancies from around the world, like the Technology Coalition and the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, both of which we joined in 2021.

Ad industry partnerships

In addition the partnerships focusing on user and community safety, TikTok has also invested greatly in partnerships designed to help provide a safe platform for brands and businesses, where they can interact with customers and users from their community freely.

· TikTok is a signatory member of GARM (the Global Alliance for Responsible Media), a cross-industry initiative that brings together advertisers, agencies, media companies, platforms and other organizations to increase digital safety. With GARM we are active participants in working groups and have contributed to the first two Aggregated Measurement Reports.

· We are TAG Brand Safety Certified globally. TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group) upholds rigorous standards for transparency in digital advertising and brand safety.

· TikTok has received Gold Standard 2.0 certification from IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) in the UK, Sweden and Ireland in recognition of our efforts to continuously raise standards and provide the best possible ad environment for brands.

· We became member of the Brand Safety Institute's Board of Advisors earlier this year. The Brand Safety Institute was founded to professionalize and advance the executive capacity needed at every company to protect their brands through research, accreditation, networking, and education.

It is important to note that at TikTok, we not only use these partnerships to inform our own operations, but to work together to actively push the industry forward as a whole, with the goal of creating a safer, healthier global digital ecosystem.

Brand safety is perpetually evolving, and our teams are committed to meeting new challenges head-on with inventive solutions that protect the TikTok community. We’ll continue to build a safe, secure app for everyone by investing in people, technology transparency and partnerships that make a difference. Brands today exist in a brave new world of advertising where anything is possible with the right piece of content. It’s thrilling…and a little bit terrifying. We get it. But with TikTok, you can rest assured that your safety is always our highest priority—and that we’ll never stop working to become the world’s safest platform for creative expression for both users and brands.

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