TikTok Increases Safety Measures for Younger Users, Including New Defaults and Prompts for Teens

A new article on Social Media Today says that TikTok is looking to add more protections for younger users, with new restrictions on DMs for teens, and added alerts around specific functions to better indicate who will be able to access their content as a result.

“People from all walks of life come to TikTok to be entertained, spark joy in their everyday, and share their creativity with others. Be it through viewing the latest book recommendations on #BookTok or showing off their new digs on #renovation, everyone can find their community on TikTok – and our goal is to foster a safe and welcoming platform for these vibrant, diverse communities.

On TikTok. we offer a range of safety and privacy controls to empower people to make decisions about who they share their content with. We also believe it’s important to ensure even stronger proactive protections to help keep teens safe, and we’ve continually introduced changes to support age-appropriate experiences on our platform. This includes making accounts belonging to those under the age of 16 private by default, reserving features like Direct Messaging to people 16 and older, and enabling parents to guide their teen’s TikTok presence with Family Pairing. Today we’re introducing a new set of changes for teens aged 13-17 to further enhance these proactive protections. These changes will continue rolling out to our community globally over the coming months.”

First of all, on direct messages – in an effort to further limit potential exposure to unwanted and/or predatory DMs, TikTok will now switch off messages for users aged 16-17 by default

Further to this, TikTok’s also adding a new pop-up alert, which will be shown to users under the age of 16 within the video upload process, which will ask them to specifically choose who can watch their clip.

TikTok’s also looking to add more context into the upload process for teen users, with alerts on how features like downloads actually work and who will be able to action such.