TikTok has announced new parental controls to protect underage users from certain posts. In addition, users will be able to more specifically control what content is shown to them in their personal feed.
Advice was once again heard on TikTok how the application can be even more adapted to its users. The result was two major modifications, which the company published in the official paper Press Release praises
On the one hand, users should be able to have even more control over which posts appear in their personal feed. On the other hand, the operators of the short video application are now increasingly concerned with the protection of minors.
This is how TikTok wants to improve youth protection
According to Cormac Keenan, head of trust and safety at TikTok, the diverse community includes generations from teenagers to grandparents.
We cater to this diverse audience by age-restricting features, controlling content and supporting parental controls.
Therefore, the social media platform is being modernized, especially in the area of youth protection. Because younger members of the community in particular have had access to complex topics that are more interesting for an older audience.
The new system now organizes content by thematic maturity. In the coming weeks, TikTok plans to roll out the first version to prevent content with overtly adult themes from reaching a younger audience under 18.
When we find that a video contains adult or complex themes, such as fictional scenes, that may be too scary or intense for younger viewers, the video is assigned a maturity level to prevent anyone under 18 from playing the video on TikTok . .
Users can influence the personal feed
TikTok didn’t just think of content for young people. The rest of the community should also have a bigger say. Especially when it comes to which topics appear in the respective user’s personal feed.
With the new tool, users can add words or hashtags to videos that they would rather ban from their homepage. The system can automatically filter out terms from the “For You” and “Watching” channels.
This allows users to influence the displayed topics according to their own preferences. They can also protect themselves from triggering tracking experiences.
TikTok is working on even more new updates
New parental control tools and more personal resources aren’t the first of the social media platform’s innovations to go in this direction. The app only tested it in April Dislike buttonhave the option to reject comments and mark them as irrelevant or inappropriate.
Since German journalists exposed that TikTok provides content with word filters that limit users’ freedom of expression, the company also tested how it could detect if the system “inadvertently recommends a limited selection of content to users.”
More features are planned to be added in the future, offering detailed content filtering capabilities to the entire TikTok community. However, in order not to end up in the devil’s kitchen again, the social network service apologizes in advance.
“At the same time, we recognize that what we are striving for is complex and we can make some mistakes.”
Well, hopefully the mistakes are limited.
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