TikTok has announced a new set of trust and safety tools aimed at improving digital well-being, enhancing privacy controls for families, and supporting creators on the platform. These updates include new parental controls, digital wellbeing features, creator protection tools, along with community-based fact-checking.
New TikTok Safety Tools
As of this announcement, TikTok says teen accounts now have more than 50 dedicated features and settings – one of the latest is called Family Pairing. This new feature allows parents to customize their teen’s experience, including receiving notifications when teens post content that is visible to others. Parents will also gain insight into how privacy settings is configured in their teen’s accounts, such as content downloads, visibility of following list, as well as the topics they have opted to view.
Regarding digital wellbeing, TikTok says its new Well-being Missions – essentially a mini-game of sorts – encourages users to develop good usage habits by completing specific tasks, such as completing quizzes and enable wellbeing-related features in the app; users that done the tasks will be awarded with achievement badges. (Or, you can just simply put the phone down – but it seems like attention spans have been destroyed to a point that even mindfulness has to be dopamine-inducing these days.)
For creators, new tools include Creator Care Mode to filter unwanted comments, a ‘bulk mute’ function for TikTok livestreams, and Content Check Lite, which allows creators to preview their content’s eligibility for the For You feed before publishing. TikTok is also rolling out Creator Inbox for managing messages more efficiently and Creator Chat Room for direct interaction between creators and eligible followers.
Earlier this year, TikTok introduced its Footnotes pilot program in the United States, which enables approved contributors to add additional contexts on videos as a form of fact-checking. The feature is now expended to general users to write and rate these information, similar to X/Twitter’s approach with its Community Notes feature.
Pokdepinion: While TikTok’s efforts are appreciated, you do wonder how bad people’s attention spans has gotten these days to warrant a minigame just to quit thumb-scrolling. It’s eerily similar to smoking epidemic, even.
