Parents of children on TikTok can breathe a collective sigh of relief. The massively popular video-sharing platform now comes equipped with a line-up of features designed to protect the privacy of their young users.
New features allow parents to have more control over their children’s accounts, a lot of changes have been introduced to young teens’ default settings, and the platform also added more restrictions on many services like commenting.
Here’s why TikTok isn’t such a scary place now.
1. TikTok Introduced Family Pairing
TikTok is releasing an important new function called ‘Family Pairing’ which will give parents more options to better manage their kids’ time in the app, while also protecting them from unwanted exposure to both offensive content and potential predators.#TikTok #DigitalMarketing pic.twitter.com/d1HD8K9aXy
— Atul Pradhan (@onairatul) April 21, 2020
In April 2020, TikTok introduced every TikTok parent’s new best friend—the family pairing feature. It allows parents to link their TikTok to their teens’, which may or may not annoy them.
This lets you apply nifty restrictions similar to the parental controls you set in their gaming consoles. You can manage their screen time by limiting how long they can use TikTok each day. There’s also a restricted mode that can help you limit what your kids can view.
And they can’t deactivate this as long as you set a passcode!
Parents can limit who can contact their teens or they can turn off direct messaging completely.
Another useful setting lets parents turn off Allow Others to Find Me. Doing this will remove the teen’s account from a list of profiles strangers can follow. Think of Facebook’s suggested friends. Removing your kid’s profile from these suggestion lists will limit the people who can add them. That way, they can tighten their TikTok circles.
But the first (and most important) thing parents should be doing through family pairing is setting their teen’s account to private. This means only approved users can see videos the teen uploads.
2. TikTok Expanded Family Pairing
A few months after its initial roll-out, TikTok went a step further with “a more robust set of tools” for its family pairing feature.
The improved family pairing feature allows parents to even adjust their teens’ searches. Parents can decide if their child can search for content, users, hashtags, or sounds.
And they can set who can comment on their teen’s videos too: everyone on the app, friends only, or no one.
Changes were also made to the liked videos feature. Parents decide if they want others to see their teen’s liked videos (although most will want to hide this).
3. TikTok Updated Gifting Policies
This feature allows users to buy and send virtual gifts to creators during a live-stream. It gives users a chance to support creators they love. Virtual gifts are converted into virtual diamonds on the person’s profile.
Diamonds can be exchanged for cash. Once a content creator makes enough diamonds, they can collect this via PayPal or another payment service.
Before the changes were made, anyone older than 13 was allowed to send virtual gifts and anyone over 16 could receive them. This led to misuse including young teens who were getting pressured into buying and sending gifts.
A BBC investigation, for instance, found that some TikTok influencers were promising to give their personal phone number to fans in exchange for virtual gifts. Many youngsters reportedly spent a lot of money on gifts in exchange for the phone number, but regretted it afterwards since the influencers never answered the calls.
So TikTok rolled out new policies that allow only users aged 18 and over to purchase, send, or receive virtual gifts.
4. TikTok Introduced Enhanced Default Privacy Settings
In a January 2021 post on the TikTok Newsroom, the video-sharing platform rolled out new settings meant to protect the privacy of young teens. These settings will hopefully keep those on the platform safe from strangers.
All accounts for users aged 13 to 15 are now set to private by default. This means that only friends and followers can see their videos. These young teens also have to approve who follows them so strangers won’t see their profiles.
The platform also announced a host of other changes including removing the “everyone” comment setting. Users aged 13 to 15 years old can only choose between “Friends” or “No one” when deciding who can comment on their videos.
It removed the option for everyone to comment on this age group’s uploads.
By default, the “Suggest your account to others” feature will be turned off for these younger users too.
6. TikTok Changed The Video Downloading Settings
Before these new policies were introduced, users could download videos made by teens without a lot of restrictions. But with the new TikTok settings, only videos posted by users aged 16 and over can be downloaded.
Even for videos uploaded by 16 to 17 year olds, permission to download will be disabled by default. These teens would need to enable it manually and allow people to download their videos from the app.
7. There’s TikTok for Younger Users
So younger kids won’t feel left out (and feel forced to fake their dates of birth to join the fun), TikTok introduced a restricted version for children. It’s an extremely washed down, squeaky clean version of the popular app.
TikTok for Younger Users is designed for children below 13 years of age. It’s only available to children residing in the United States though.
It lets children view a carefully curated selection of age-appropriate videos from other users. But while the kids can shoot their own videos, add music to them, and use effects, they can’t share these with other users.
They cannot maintain a profile with followers. Videos are only saved directly to their device. They can’t exchange messages on the platform and others can’t view their profiles.
Yes, technically, they can’t do much, except brag that they’re finally on TikTok. Well, sort of.
But Don’t Let Your Guard Down
With all these new features, it seems like TikTok isn’t such a scary place for children after all. But parents shouldn’t let their guard down.
Savvy teens can easily circumvent any parental control settings. And strangers determined to target your kids could find a way to get to them. So it’s still important to keep a close eye on your children. Watch out for notifications telling you that settings have been changed.
Talk to your kids about the importance of their privacy and security online. This way, they’ll be more receptive to the parental controls you set. They’ll know that you only want to keep them safe and won’t think you’re doing these things just to make their lives miserable.
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