Content blocking and censorship are something that has become commonplace and ingrained in any government ruling Malaysia. Recently, TikTok released a transparency report regarding the country’s government’s requests to block content and accounts on TikTok from January to June 2024.
Quite surprisingly, the report showed that the Malaysian government came up with the world’s highest number of content and account blocking requests, at 2606 requests throughout 2024. The total number of content requested to be taken down was reported to be 8836 videos.
TikTok was also seen breaking down the number of content that was taken down, and breaking it down into two parts, namely content and accounts that were taken down for violating the TikTok platform’s rules of use, and content that was taken down for violating national laws.
For violations of platform rules, 2229 pieces of content were deleted from the platform, while for violations of national laws, 5296 pieces of content were deleted.
For accounts that were banned, 2080 accounts were banned for violating the platform's rules, and 423 accounts were banned for violating national laws. This figure is also the highest in the world for this segment.
In terms of the rate of content and account removal based on Malaysian government requests, the average removal rate is seen at 86 percent, which is also one of the highest rates in the world for the platform.
Perhaps surprisingly, the number of requests to block content and accounts on TikTok by the Malaysian government is more than the next five countries on the list, including Indonesia, Australia, Russia, Pakistan and Turkey.
For the country with the most content on this list, it is Pakistan with 25,367 pieces of content, of which 94.4 percent were also removed from the platform.
If you are interested in reading and viewing this report for yourself, you can go to the TikTok Government Removal Requests Report website.