TikTok and AfricTivistes deepen stakeholder collaboration at Dakar Summit, shaping regional policy and online safety.
TikTok, in collaboration with AfricTivistes, held its inaugural West Africa Safety Summit in Dakar, Senegal, convening government leaders, policy experts, NGOs, regulators, media and industry representatives from across West Africa and the Sahel. Delegates from Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Chad and Ethiopia gathered to address regional challenges in user safety and content moderation.
Duduzile Mkhize, TikTok’s Outreach and Partnerships Manager for sub-Saharan Africa, underscored the platform’s focus on enhancing safety by integrating insights from local stakeholders. She noted that TikTok’s global operations remain rooted in local realities and stressed the importance of cooperation to prevent fragmented digital policies and strengthen online protections for users.
A key contributor to the summit was Senegalese digital specialist Aisha Dabo, co-founder of AfricTivistes and a member of TikTok’s sub-Saharan Africa Safety Advisory Council. Drawing on two decades of experience in digital advocacy, Dabo highlighted the value of African-led solutions in global policy development. She described the summit as an opportunity to ensure African perspectives guide worldwide safety strategies and help foster a secure, inclusive and representative digital environment.
The event also followed the release of TikTok’s latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, which detailed the platform’s combined use of automated moderation and human expertise to remove harmful content swiftly. Since January 2024, TikTok has taken down over 34m videos across West Africa, representing an average of just 0.6% of all content published in the region. Between April and June 2025 alone, 8.3m videos were removed, with 87% detected automatically.
TikTok also disclosed its efforts to disrupt covert influence operations. In March 2025, the platform identified a network of 129 accounts operating from Togo that attempted to manipulate political discourse in West Africa and France. In Senegal specifically, more than 2.5m videos were removed between early 2024 and mid-2025, along with over 16,000 interrupted LIVE sessions.
Globally, TikTok removed 189m videos in Q2 2025—just 0.7% of all uploads—with 99.1% detected proactively and 163.9m removed through AI-driven systems. During the same period, the platform removed nearly 77m fake accounts and over 25m suspected underage accounts to safeguard platform integrity.
TikTok also published, for the first time, data on actions taken to enforce its LIVE monetisation guidelines. In Q2 2025, more than 2.3m LIVE sessions and over one million creators received warnings or were demonetised for violating these rules, part of ongoing efforts to promote safe, high-quality and authentic livestream content.
By combining advanced automated systems with the work of thousands of safety professionals, TikTok aims to strengthen protections against misinformation, hate speech and harmful content—reinforcing its commitment to fostering a secure digital ecosystem across West Africa and beyond.
