SEO
12 SEO KPIs You Should (And Shouldn’t) Track

SEO KPIs (key performance indicators) are the most important SEO metrics that are closely tied to business growth. They determine the actions you take, so you should choose the KPIs wisely.
In this article, we’ll go through 12 common SEO KPIs and discuss if and how you should track them.
Search visibility measures how visible your brand is in the market. Sometimes also referred to as SERP visibility, it’s the SEO version of one of the most important marketing KPIs: share of voice (SOV).
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
Yes. Search visibility is one of the most useful and universally applicable SEO KPIs. In fact, it’s arguably the only non-conversion metric that can be closely tied to your business growth.
That’s because there’s a strong relationship between SOV and market share. Generally speaking, the higher your SOV, the bigger your share of the pie.

How to track it
Paste the keywords that matter to you into Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. Note that these should be the main keywords that encompass what your target audience is searching for (don’t bother with long-tails). Add a tag to easily filter them later on:

From there, head to the Competitors Overview tab and check the Visibility column:

Conversions are important actions your visitors take on the website, such as checking out, signing up, or subscribing to a service. Tracking these for all your traffic sources, including organic, is something most businesses already do.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
Yes. This is arguably the only indisputable SEO KPI. Conversion tracking is the most straightforward way to tie your marketing efforts to your revenue.
How to track it
Setting up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 isn’t rocket science, even though it may seem daunting at first. You don’t need any coding knowledge to do it. The most important thing here is making sure that you track the right conversions.
If you’re running an e-commerce store, the number of conversions, their value, and your average order value make the most sense for you. You’ll have to set up specific e-commerce tracking to do that.
If you offer subscription-based software like us, your best bet is to track leads, trial sign-ups, paid subscriptions and, eventually, even each tier of new subscriptions.
Got the data collection right? In Google Analytics 4, go to Reports > Engagement > Conversions and filter organic traffic sessions using the “Edit comparisons” button:

There’s a lot to be said about the accuracy of conversion reporting and all the nuances regarding the attribution behind it. Generally speaking, you’ll get the most accurate data if:
- You’re using GA4 (you should by now).
- You use the data-driven attribution model as the default (check Admin > Attribution settings > Reporting attribution model).
- You have at least a few hundred conversions a month (to make sure that Google’s black box model has enough data to do its magic).
If you don’t have that many conversions on your website yet, it’s a good idea to also check your assisted conversions using different attribution models. Go to Advertising > Attribution > Conversion paths, select the conversion event you want to analyze, and check the impact of organic search throughout customer journeys:

I recommend checking this resource about attribution modeling if you want to better understand this complex topic.
SEO ROI (return on investment) estimates the business value of all SEO activities in contrast to their cost. The formula is:
SEO ROI = (value of organic conversions – cost of SEO investments)/cost of SEO investments *100
In other words, you need to divide the SEO profit by the associated SEO costs and then multiply that by 100 to get the ROI percentage.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
Only if you’re required to present the ROI by your client, manager, or stakeholders. It’s a great SEO KPI in essence but incredibly difficult to measure properly.
Arguably, the biggest challenge comes to the discrepancy between “investment” and “return” periods. SEO can take a lot of time before the desired results kick in, and you can almost never say with 100% confidence that activity X brought results Y.
However, we can drop the concept of looking at SEO ROI from the whole website perspective. To get as accurate as we can with this metric, we need to get more granular.
How to track it
If possible, measure the ROI on the category, page, or even keyword level. That’s because you can measure well the “return” of ranking with particular pages and tell the “investments” that went into it.
Let’s say you spent $1,000 on paying a content writer who created a nice piece of content meaning to rank and drive conversions. You spent another $1,000 on a link building agency that built a few nice links. You count in $500 by default as your time and the time of your team (e.g., designers, editors) to do the rest of the work. And we’re at $2,500.
After a year, you check Google Analytics and see that this organic landing page drove $5,000 in conversions already. You can already claim 200% ROI on that, and it will likely keep on increasing.
This is a simplified example, of course. If you’re intrigued, head over to my guide to SEO ROI.
Backlinks are one of the most important SEO ranking factors.
The number and quality of new backlinks pointing to your website generally reflect your SEO, content marketing, and PR efforts, so this is something most businesses pay close attention to.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
Yes, but it’s only suitable as an SEO KPI if you actively build links and keep track of your outreach success. That’s the only way to take into account only links that are worth pursuing.
How to track it
Tracking your outreach success can’t get easier once you’re done with link prospecting, the process of figuring out what backlinks you want to get. Just add a column, note, or comment into your link prospecting sheet that indicates you either got the link or not.
Here’s an example of what newly built link tracking looked like back when I was doing the outreach myself:

You’ll either learn that your outreach was successful by receiving a positive reply or discovering a desired backlink in the Backlinks report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

Keyword rankings refer to a website’s organic ranking positions in the search results for particular keywords.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
No. Use search visibility as a KPI instead, as it’s a superior metric. But since you need proper keyword research to track it properly, ad hoc keyword rankings could serve as a provisional substitute until you get there.
How to track it
Simply paste a bunch of keywords important to you into Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker.

You can get regular email alerts about the progress of your tracked keywords or just check the Rank Tracker reports once in a while:

Organic traffic represents all non-paid clicks that come from search engines.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
Not unless you’re monetizing your website with display ads. It doesn’t make much sense for other businesses because more traffic won’t necessarily mean more revenue.
For example, HubSpot’s page about typing the “shrug” emoji gets an estimated 65.4K monthly organic visits. But I doubt any of those visits will translate into higher brand awareness, let alone higher sales.

How to track it
The Performance tab in Google Search Console (GSC) is going to give you the most accurate view of your organic traffic over time:

This tells you how many of your pages a search engine has in its index.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
It depends. Seeing the number of indexed pages steadily increasing as you publish new content is a solid indicator that Google doesn’t have problems crawling and indexing your website. But most websites don’t have this problem in the first place.
So consider tracking this number as a technical SEO KPI only if you’re likely to have trouble getting your content indexed in a timely manner. That’s usually the case for large and complex websites only.
How to track it
The best way to keep track of the number of your indexed pages is to check the Pages report in your GSC account. In there, select “All submitted pages” filter to only show pages from your sitemaps:

We’re doing this because your sitemaps should only include URLs that you want to have indexed. Analyzing the number of indexed pages in this segment and relating it to “Not indexed” is, therefore, the best choice for this technical SEO KPI:

Health Score shows the proportion of internal URLs on your website that don’t have technical SEO errors.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
No. It’s a great proxy metric for your overall state of technical SEO, and that’s it. You always need to get more context for any valuable insights. Here’s an example why:
404 HTTP status code is one of those technical SEO issues that will trigger an error in any crawler. Showing that a resource wasn’t found is usually bad for both visitors and search engines. But there’s a huge difference between having a 404 on a well-converting page with high organic traffic and one that’s not very important.
In essence, some technical SEO errors are much more serious than others, but Health Score doesn’t make a difference there.
How to track it
Most SEO crawlers provide Health Score or some alternative metric with different names.
In the case of Ahrefs’ Site Audit, you need to set up a project, start the first crawl, and then check the Health Score in the crawl overview:

Domain Rating (DR) is an Ahrefs metric that shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
No. You can use it to gauge a website’s backlink profile strength, but a deeper analysis is always needed to assess it properly. DR is just another useful proxy metric SEOs like to work with.
If you’re looking for a backlinks KPI, scroll back to “new backlinks.” That’s a much better choice where we can take into account all the important backlink variables.
How to track it
Look up any domain in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, and you’ll see DR as the first metric in the overview box:

Click-through rate (CTR) shows the proportion of SERP impressions that translated into clicks. CTR represents how effective your search engine listing is in attracting people to visit your webpage.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
No. Driving more search traffic by having more engaging SERP listings doesn’t necessarily translate into more sales. Clickbait could do quite the opposite. And yes, Google is far from perfect and still ranks clickbait pages for certain keywords.
Another reason why you shouldn’t obsess over CTR is that many things outside your control can affect that. SERPs are an ever-changing environment.
And last but not least, CTR is useless on an aggregate level of your whole website. It only makes sense to track and optimize CTR as a page-level metric because that’s the scope you optimize for.
How to track it
Open up your Performance report in GSC, switch to the Pages tab, and check the CTRs of your specific pages:

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of three technical SEO metrics related to your website speed and user experience.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
No. Google has been using CWV as a minor ranking factor since June 2021. As the word “minor” implies, you can’t expect any significant ranking boost even if you have perfect CWV scores across your whole website.
Focus on CWV has its place in SEO, but it’s been a bit overhyped. If any or all of those three CWV metrics are very bad, it’s likely a good idea to try and fix them. But they don’t even remotely qualify as an SEO KPI.
How to track it
There are many ways to track CWV, but the most straightforward is to check your GSC account under the Core web vitals report:

Engagement metrics give you an idea of how engaged visitors are with your website. Most people know them from Google Analytics, and they include metrics such as Bounce Rate, Engagement Rate, Time on Page, or Avg. Session Duration.
Should you track it as an SEO KPI?
No. These metrics usually don’t even reflect on your SEO growth, let alone business growth. But many marketers are obsessed with them for some reason.
In short, here are three reasons why these should only be used as secondary SEO metrics at best:
- They’re easily skewed by inherently flawed tracking in analytics software and mistakes in tracking setups.
- The methodology of calculating some of those metrics is rather bad.
- They become somewhat useful only after you segment them on a page level for a specific traffic source.
If you’re interested in learning more, I dive deeper into all these reasons in our guide to interpreting and improving Bounce Rate, one of the most commonly used and known engagement metrics.
How to track it
Most of your reports in Google Analytics will show these engagement metrics by default. As I mentioned earlier, if you plan to analyze them, it’s best to filter your report to show specific pages for one traffic source:

Final thoughts
It may have surprised you that only the first two SEO KPIs in this list got an absolute yes from me. Well, choosing the right objectives and respective KPIs is the main part of creating a great marketing strategy. And with all things strategy, it’s more about choosing what not to do. In this case, which SEO metrics not to pay too much attention to.
There are uses for all the listed metrics, though. It’s generally a good idea to keep track of them all. Some of them nicely correlate with your chosen KPIs and can even be a better choice for assessing your day-to-day SEO work. Just think twice before giving a certain metric too much importance.
Last but not least, tracking the right KPIs isn’t a panacea for your SEO. You need to learn how to analyze and interpret them to make the most informed decision. Critical thinking, knowledge of your data, and tracking platforms and basic statistics belong to the desired skill set here.
Got any questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
Should Congress Investigate Big Tech Platforms?

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a full committee hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew to discuss how the platform handles users’ data, its effect on kids, and its relationship with ByteDance, its Chinese parent company.
This hearing is part of an ongoing investigation to determine whether TikTok should be banned in the United States or forced to split from ByteDance.
A ban on TikTok would affect over 150 million Americans who use TikTok for education, entertainment, and income generation.
It would also affect the five million U.S. businesses using TikTok to reach customers.
Is TikTok The Only Risk To National Security?
According to a memo released by the Tech Oversight Project, TikTok is not the only tech platform that poses risks to national security, mental health, and children.
As Congress scrutinizes TikTok, the Tech Oversight Project also strongly urges an investigation of risks posed by tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Google.
These platforms have a documented history of serving content harmful to younger audiences and adversarial to U.S. interests. They have also failed on many occasions to protect users’ private data.
Many Big Tech companies have seen TikTok’s success and tried to emulate some of its features to encourage users to spend as much time within their platforms’ ecosystems as possible. Academics, activists, non-governmental organizations, and others have long raised concerns about these platforms’ risks.
To truly reduce Big Rech’s risks to our society, Congress must look beyond TikTok and hold other companies accountable for the same dangers they pose to national security, mental health, and private data.
Risks Posed By Big Tech Companies
The following are examples of the risks Big Tech companies pose to U.S. users.
Amazon
Amazon has made several controversial moves, including a partnership with a state propaganda agency to launch a China books portal and offering AWS services to Chinese companies, including a banned surveillance firm with ties to the military.
Apple
Independent research found that Apple collects detailed information about its users, even when users choose not to allow tracking by apps from the App Store. Over half of the top 200 suppliers for Apple operate factories in China.
The FTC fined Google and YouTube $170 million for collecting children’s data without parental consent. YouTube also changed its algorithm to make it more addictive, increasing users’ time watching videos and consuming ads.
Meta
Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest the private data of over 50 million users. It also failed to notify over 530 million users of a data breach that resulted in users’ private data being stolen.
It also allowed Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The influence operation posed as an independent news organization with 13 accounts and two pages, pushing messages critical of right-wing voices and the center-left.
TikTok
TikTok employees confirmed that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is involved in decision-making and has access to TikTok’s user data. While testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Vanessa Pappas, TikTok COO, would not confirm whether ByteDance would give TikTok user data to the Chinese government.
Conclusion
While the dangers posed by TikTok are undeniable, it’s clear that Congress should also address the risks posed throughout the tech industry. By holding all major offenders accountable, we can create a safe, secure, and responsible digital landscape for everyone.
Featured Image: Koshiro K/Shutterstock
SEO
The 29 Best WordPress Plugins (Organized by Category)
WordPress plugins make your life easier by allowing you to add features to your website without learning to code or hire a developer.
However, over 60,000 WordPress plugins are available, and more are released every day. Plus, installing too many plugins can cause slow website loading speeds, so you want to avoid adding too many of these plugins.
To help you limit your installed plugins to only the most worthy, I’ve compiled this list of the 29 best WordPress plugins categorized by what they’re good for.
This list comes from my more than 12 years of experience building WordPress websites and working closely with my WordPress developer.
First up, we have some plugins to help you design and add specific functionalities to your WordPress website.
Elementor

Cost: Free ($59/year for premium)
Useful for:
- Building a website theme with drag-and-drop editing
- Easily creating custom landing pages
Elementor is awesome for anyone who wants a custom-looking website without learning how to code or being limited to a pre-built theme. But it also has pre-built themes you can customize to streamline the process.
Be aware that using any kind of drag-and-drop editor like this will slow down your site.
WooCommerce

Cost: Free
Useful for: Turning your WordPress website into an e-commerce store
WooCommerce is the best plugin to start an e-commerce business on your WordPress website. It allows you to easily create product pages and collections.
You can combine it with WooCommerce Payments to easily collect customer payment information.
Advanced Custom Fields Pro

Cost: $49/year for a single site
Useful for: Creating custom widgets to use anywhere on your site
If you know how to code, Advanced Custom Fields Pro allows you to take full control over your WordPress edit screens and custom field data.
WPCode

Cost: Free ($49–$399/year for premium)
Useful for: Inserting code into your headers and footers
Formerly called Insert Headers and Footers, WPCode is the easiest way for non-developers to add code snippets anywhere on their website.
For example, you may have to add a code snippet to your website’s header to connect it with Google Analytics or to add the Facebook Remarketing Pixel.
WPForms

Cost: $49.50/year
Useful for:
- Creating forms for contact pages, newsletter sign-ups, and more
- Building surveys for your site visitors
WPForms is a drag-and-drop WordPress form editor. It’s super intuitive and easy to use.
TranslatePress

Cost: €89/year (~USD 95)
Useful for: Translating your website into other languages
TranslatePress makes it easy to create translated versions of your website in other languages. It also automatically adds the hreflang tags for each language, so it’s also good for SEO.
Formilla

Cost: Free (varying premium plans starting at $19.99/month)
Useful for: Adding a live chat feature to your site
Formilla is a live chat plugin for WordPress. You can offer live chat support or use it to answer visitors’ questions automatically using a bot—although that may annoy them.
Next up, we’ve got a whole suite of plugins that help you make your website more secure and easier to manage. WordPress sites are often vulnerable to hacking, so these are important.
Wordfence

Cost: Free ($119/year for premium)
Useful for: Keeping your website safe from hackers and malware
Wordfence adds a robust firewall and malware scanner to protect your site from hackers and malicious software. You can also use it to add two-factor login authentication, have rate limiting, and run security diagnostics on your site—to name a few of the features.
UpdraftPlus
Cost: Free ($119/year for premium)
Useful for: Backing up your WordPress website
It’s important to back up your website every so often to avoid losing your content in the event of a plugin clash, hack, or even accidental deletion. UpdraftPlus makes this easy for you.
Wordable
Cost: Free ($50/month for premium)
Useful for: Uploading content from Google Docs to WordPress at the click of a button
Wordable makes it easy to upload content from Google Docs to your WordPress website (including images, formatting, etc., without any extra hidden code). It’s saved me a lot of time and money not needing to do it myself or having my virtual assistant to do it.
PublishPress

Cost: $129–$399/year (depending on tier)
Useful for: Managing a team of writers and editors on your website
PublishPress makes it easy to manage multiple writers and editors on your site, with the ability to manage their permissions of what they can do and see. It also includes an editorial calendar, new blocks for the Gutenberg editor, and more.
MemberPress

Cost: $179.50–$399.50/year (depending on tier)
Useful for: Creating a membership website
MemberPress makes it easy to turn your WordPress website into a paid membership site, allowing you to build and sell courses and forums and put them behind a paywall.
Uncanny Automator
Cost: $149–$399/year (depending on tier)
Useful for: Automating tasks on your website
Uncanny Automator is like Zapier but for WordPress. It can automate tasks like sharing a post to social media or in a newsletter when it’s published, track data in a spreadsheet whenever a product is purchased, and a million other things. Its only limit is your own creativity.
WP Simple Pay

Cost: $49.50–$299.50/year (depending on tier)
Useful for: Adding a simple Stripe payment processor to your site
WP Simple Pay makes it easy to accept Stripe payments on your website. This is great if you only sell a few products or services and want to avoid the trouble of setting up the WooCommerce plugin and connecting it with a payment processor and your bank.
WP Mail SMTP
Cost: $49–$399/year (depending on tier)
Useful for: Improving email deliverability
WP Mail SMTP allows you to set up SMTP and PHP mail servers to improve your email deliverability whenever you send customers or visitors an email from your site.
A quick-loading site is vital for audience retention, conversions, and SEO. To help you speed up your WordPress site, you can consider using these plugins.
NitroPack
Cost: $17.50–$146.67/month (depending on tier)
Useful for: An all-in-one tool to speed up your website
NitroPack is my favorite all-in-one speed enhancer, with smart caching, image optimization, a built-in CDN, and more—all without needing developer experience. However, it’s not cheap. If you need a more affordable option, look at the next two plugins.
WP Rocket
Cost: $59–$299/year (depending on tier)
Useful for: Adding website caching
WP Rocket adds caching to your WordPress website, allowing you to improve your loading speeds and Core Web Vitals score. However, it doesn’t have image optimization or a CDN, so it’s missing features compared to NitroPack. That’s where the next plugin comes in.
Autoptimize
Cost: Free
Useful for: Adding website speed optimization features like image compression
Autoptimize fills in the gaps left by WP Rocket. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, inject CSS in the page head by default, optimize and lazy-load images, and much more. However, it does require some learning and tweaking, so it’s not very beginner-friendly.
Traffic is what makes your website valuable. Here are some of the best WordPress plugins to help you promote your site.
PushEngage
Cost: Free ($9–$49/month for premium)
Useful for: Adding push notifications to your website
PushEngage is the best push notification plugin I’ve found. It lets you easily advertise push notification services to your visitors and sends the notifications in a way that is well designed and easy to use.
Keep in mind that push notifications can be extremely annoying to visitors if you’re not cautious about them.
RafflePress
Cost: $39.50–$499.50/year (depending on tier)
Useful for: Running viral raffles and giveaways
RafflePress makes running raffles and giveaways on your site easy by giving visitors single-click options to earn entries. They can follow, subscribe, like, and comment just by clicking each button on your giveaway and get extra entries for each task they complete.
OptinMonster

Cost: $9–$49/month (depending on tier)
Useful for: Creating beautiful opt-in forms and gamified wheels
OptinMonster is a form-builder plugin that helps you optimize conversions to grow your email list. It also has gamified wheels, which I’ve never used. But it seems like a fun thing to test for e-commerce websites.
Thrive Quiz Builder
Cost: $99/year (or $299/year for the entire Thrive Suite)
Useful for: Creating quizzes on your site that are easily shareable
Thrive Quiz Builder makes it easy to, well, build quizzes. You can use it to make one of those viral Facebook quizzes moms love to take and share their results.
Smash Balloon
Cost: $49–$299/year (depending on which feeds you want)
Useful for: Adding social media feeds to your website
Smash Balloon makes displaying feeds from your social media profiles on your WordPress website easy. This is helpful if you want to showcase your photography or video services or rely heavily on social media for sponsorships.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of growing your website. In my experience, the following plugins are the best WordPress SEO plugins.
Yoast SEO/Rank Math/SEOPress

Cost: Free (various paid options)
Useful for:
- Basic on-page SEO
- Creating a robots.txt file and sitemap
- Easily editing metadata
These types of plugins are essential for a WordPress website. They allow you to edit important SEO options on your pages and make implementing SEO on your site much easier and more streamlined.
Of these three, my personal favorite is Rank Math. I have used Yoast SEO and SEOPress, but I like the team behind Rank Math the most and find the plugin to be easy to use with a solid UI. They’re all great, however, and do pretty much the same things. Just pick one.
Ahrefs’ WordPress SEO Plugin

Cost: Free
Useful for: Suggesting ways to better optimize your content to rank higher in search results
Our SEO plugin makes it easy to automate content audits, monitor backlinks, and grow organic traffic to your WordPress website. It’s free, so try it out.
MonsterInsights

Cost: $99.50–$399.50/year (depending on tier)
Useful for: Gathering helpful insights into your site traffic
MonsterInsights is a WordPress analytics plugin that shows you insights into how much traffic you’re getting, which pages people are visiting, and what they’re doing. It also provides e-commerce insights like goal conversions and also integrates with Google Analytics.
Last but not least, the following plugins are excellent to help you make more money from affiliate marketing.
Lasso
Cost: $39–$299/month (depending on how many sites you want it for)
Useful for:
- Tracking, managing, and automating your affiliate links
- Creating product display boxes and comparison tables
- Getting suggestions for new affiliate programs
Lasso gets my favorite plugin of the year award. It makes tracking, managing, and automating your affiliate links easy. Plus, you can create conversion-optimized product display boxes and tables, get suggestions for affiliate programs for products you’re mentioning but not affiliated with, and more.
AffiliateWP

Cost: $39–$299/month (depending on how many sites you want it for)
Useful for: Adding an affiliate program to your website
AffiliateWP allows you to create and manage your own affiliate program so you can have affiliates promote your products for you.
AdSanity
Cost: $59–$179/year ($499 for lifetime access)
Useful for: Managing ads on your WordPress website
AdSanity makes it easy to manage ads on your site and add them using widgets, shortcodes, or template tags. It also gives you publishing options to create start and end dates, analytics reporting to see your ads’ effectiveness, and more.
Final thoughts
There are a lot of WordPress plugins out there. Many are unnecessary, and having too many can add code bloat and drastically slow down your website.
Hopefully, you’ve found the right plugins in this list to install only the ones you really need and avoid others you don’t.
SEO
TikTok Updated Community Guidelines To Include AI Content

TikTok has updated its Community Guidelines, which will go into effect on April 21, 2023.
The updated guidelines introduce TikTok’s Community Principles, which guide content moderation to uphold human rights and international legal frameworks.
TikTok worked with over 100 organizations globally to strengthen its rules to address new threats and reduce potential user harm.
Key changes to Community Guidelines apply to synthetic media, tribes, and civic and election integrity.
AI-Generated Content
TikTok defines “synthetic media” as content created or modified by AI. While AI and related technologies allow creators to express themselves in many new ways, they can also blur the line between fact and fiction for viewers.
Creators must label synthetic or altered media as such to mitigate the potential risks of spreading misinformation.
To reduce potential harm, synthetic media featuring real private individuals is prohibited. Private individuals include anyone under 18 and adults who are not public figures. The use of public figures over 18 – government officials, politicians, business leaders, and celebrities – is permitted, but with restrictions.
Creators must not use synthetic media to violate policies against hate speech, sexual exploitation, and severe harassment. They must also clearly disclose synthetic media and manipulated content that depict realistic scenes with fake people, places, or events.
Public figures cannot be used in synthetic audio or video for political or commercial endorsements to mislead users about financial or political issues.
You can, however, use synthetic media in artistic and educational content.
Protection Of Tribes
TikTok policies already include rules meant to protect people and groups with specific attributes from hateful behavior, hate speech, and hateful ideologies.
With new guidelines, the platform added Tribes to the list of protected attributes, including ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation.
While TikTok allows critical content on public figures, as defined above, it prohibits language that harasses, humiliates, threatens, or doxxes everyone.
Users can consult resources and tools provided by TikTok to identify bullying behavior and configure their settings to prevent it from affecting them further.
Civil And Election Integrity
Noting that elections are essential to community dialogue and upholding societal values, TikTok recently emphasized its alleged efforts to encourage topical discussions while maintaining unity.
To achieve this goal, paid political promotion, advertising, and fundraising by politicians or parties are prohibited. This policy applies to traditional ads and compensated creator content.
TikTok claims to support informed civic idea exchanges to promote constructive conversations without allowing misinformation about voting processes and election outcomes. Content that includes unverified claims about election results will not be eligible to appear in the For You Feed.
Before these changes go into effect next month, moderators will receive additional training on enforcing them effectively.
Will Recent Changes Prevent More TikTok Bans?
TikTok’s refreshed Community Guidelines and explanation of Community Principles appear to attempt greater transparency and foster a safe, inclusive, and authentic environment for all users.
TikTok plans to continue investing in safety measures to encourage creativity and connection within its global community of one billion users globally.
TikTok’s latest changes to improve transparency, reduce harm, and provide higher-quality content for users may be part of efforts to prevent the app from being banned in the U.S.
This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a full committee hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew on how congress can protect the data privacy of U.S. users and children from online harm.
Organizations like the Tech Oversight Project have also expressed concerns about risks that big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta pose.
Featured Image: BigTunaOnline/Shutterstock
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