In order to provide a safe and secure experience on our services, LINE suspends content that violates our terms of service agreements and relevant laws. This report details the results of content moderation over a given period of time.
LINE employs a two-step process to monitor posts on Timeline(LINE VOOM), LINE LIVE, LINE Manga and other LINE services. User-posted content is checked first by (1) an automatic monitoring system and then afterwards as needed by (2) our monitoring team. This two-step process helps ensure that any post that violates our terms of service agreements or relevant laws do not spread on LINE's various community platforms.
First, user-posted content on supported LINE services is checked by the automatic monitoring system to ensure that it does not contain any prohibited language, break any service rules, or violate the terms of service or relevant laws. If objectionable content is found by the monitoring system, it is immediately suspended after being posted.
Next, a monitoring team checks any content the monitoring system cannot classify. The monitoring team compares the content against a set of evaluation criteria and previous examples to make a decision on whether or not the content is safe. If the monitoring team determines the posted content is in violation of the terms of service or relevant laws, it is suspended.
Please refer to the chart below for more information on suspended content by the monitoring team in the last six months.
(1) Content Suspended by Automatic Check | 10,009,824 items |
(2) Content Suspended by Manual Check | 9,517,033 items |
Total 19,526,857 items |
The breakdown of types of suspended content by manual check is as follows:
Promotion of illegal activity | 27% |
---|---|
Obscene content | 24% |
Spam | 21% |
Unpermitted commercial use of accounts | 10% |
Socilication | 6% |
Disturbing and problematic content | 5% |
Others | 7% |
LINE suspended 19,526,857 content between July to December 2019. This is an increase of about 8.5%, compared to 17,992,632 suspended content in the previous term. Although Timeline spams decreased (16.8 million → 13.2 million), 5.4 million content were suspended on OpenChat, which began services in August 2019. This led to an overall increase in the number of suspended content. Content relating to illegal online casinos (advertisements, URLs, etc.) in Thailand account for a large percentage of the suspended content.
LINE is unable to monitor any message a user sends/receives on a regular LINE chat room unless the user sends unencrypted chat data to LINE by using the reporting tool. How LINE responded to the reported messages is not in the scope of this report.
LINE will continue working hard to provide safe and secure services with the most transparent operations possible.