TikTok steps up its commitment to the safety of minors 👨🏿‍👩🏾‍👧🏽‍👦🏿🛡️

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The famous Chinese platform TikTok is widely used by teenagers. The social network has therefore introduced a new strategy designed to give parents greater control over their children’s activity.

A way to appease regulators?🤔

TikTok is aiming to improve its image by stepping up parental controls and better monitoring of minors. Indeed, TikTok has recently come under scrutiny regarding the safety of children and teenagers (aged 13-17) in the US and other countries. To defend itself, the platform has announced that it will give parents greater control over what their teenagers can see by adding new content filtering controls to its « Family Pairing » feature, which allows parents to filter videos containing specific words or hashtags.

Family Pairing: How does it work? 👨🏿‍👩🏾‍👧🏽‍👦🏿📱

Introduced in 2020, this option offers parents a direct link to their children’s accounts, allowing them to remotely disable direct messages, set usage limits and activate a « restricted content » mode, among other things. Last year, an automatic filtering tool for videos containing certain words or hashtags was also introduced.

TikTok’s new update combines these two features, giving parents the ability to remotely filter the videos from their children’s accounts that appear in their News Feed (Follow and For You). However, minors will be informed of the filters selected by their parents and will be able to choose not to participate.

TikTok explique ainsi :

« Therefore, by default, teens can view the keywords their caregiver has added and we believe this transparency can also help to prompt conversations about online boundaries and safety ».

A world that includes young people in the digital world 🤗

TikTok has become a key interactive tool for many young users, and two-thirds of teenagers (aged 13-17) now use the app for entertainment, discovery and social connection. Many younger users also regularly access the app, although TikTok has implemented enhanced age control features to prevent those under 13 from using the platform.

Despite this, the statistics underline why these initiatives are so important, both to offer greater peace of mind to parents and to protect young users from harmful in-app exposure. It’s worth remembering that such exposure can cause significant damage, and we need to do all we can to protect young people from facing the worst of the world before they have the ability to cope. TikTok is working to solve this problem, and these new tools will give parents more options for managing their own children’s access.

However, the app respects young people’s right to participate in the digital world and, despite the aforementioned update, they will still have access to excluded hashtags. In other good news, via a blog post, the app has announced the creation of a TikTok Youth Council, deployed globally with the aim of gathering feedback from young users and improving the platform.

What do you think of this new option?

Sources: Tiktok, Engadget, PresseCitron