Is TikTok leaking drafts? How to keep your private videos safe

Unsplash: Solen Feyissa

TikTok users are reporting that the app may be leaking their drafts, potentially sharing videos to the platform that were never supposed to be seen by anyone besides the creator. Here’s how to best protect your drafts if the rumors are true.

For any app or service, customer safety is often a top priority. Users want to know that their private information or, in this case, content, won’t be accessible to anybody else.

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That said, anything that takes place online can be in some way hacked or bugged to create issues of private information and data being shared, and it looks like this might be happening on TikTok.

Flickr: Aaron Yoo
TikTok users have become worried for their private videos after an apparent leak.

For anyone who regularly uses the app, you’ll probably have a huge backlog of videos in your drafts just sitting there doing nothing – but this might not exactly be the case.

Rumors that TikTok has been posting people’s drafts without their knowledge have been around since as far back as at least 2020, but they reignited in August 2022 after several videos claiming it was happening again started to gain traction.

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Is TikTok posting drafts?

The short answer to the question is that we don’t have enough evidence yet to suggest that the app is leaking drafts – but some users have suggested that their drafts ARE mysteriously being published without their knowledge.

One user claimed “TikTok just randomly posted one of my drafts, 100k people saw it, I’m gonna cry,” with other videos claiming similar incidents happened to them garnering tens of thousands of likes and views.

It’s not clear whether these reports are legitimate, but regardless, the potential of TikTok leaking drafts is understandably concerning for many users.

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How to stop your TikTok drafts being leaked

The simple solution to stopping your TikTok drafts from being leaked is to delete them. By not having them on the app at all, you don’t have to worry about any of them being posted without your knowledge.

If you’re not happy for your drafts to be seen, you should delete them altogether but, if you do want to keep them, you can simply save them to your device so you don’t lose them entirely.

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TikTok
Make sure you delete your drafts if you don’t want to risk them being seen.

If you find your drafts have been leaked, the best option would be to try and delete the video, but if for some reason you’re not able to, it’s worth contacting TikTok customer support to try and get the issue resolved.

As stated above, there isn’t extensive evidence that the application is leaking drafts, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.