TikTok Makes an attempt to Defend Youthful Customers With New Restrictions / Digital Info World

A large proportion of TikTok users are actually quite young, between the ages of 13 and 17. Due to the fact that this is the kind of thing that could potentially put these children at risk, many people have urged TikTok to put restrictions in place to protect them. TikTok is now implementing some of these suggestions.

Profiles of users between the ages of 13 and 15 are now automatically set to private, which means that only their followers can see them and they must approve followers before they can access their content. In addition, direct messages from users under the age of 17 will be disabled by default, although existing users in that age group have still enabled them and will instead be prompted to review their privacy settings.

Another really positive step that TikTok is taking is to prevent users under the age of 16 from receiving notifications after 9:00 p.m. Using social media before bed has been known to result in intermittent and not particularly restful sleep, so the fact that TikTok is trying to reduce nighttime usage is definitely a good thing.

TikTok is also introducing a feature that “helps teenagers understand the sharing options available to them,” TikTok said, it “now adds a pop-up that appears when teenagers under 16 are ready to share their first video and asks for “decide who can watch the video.” Additionally, users under 17 “won’t be able to publish their videos until they have made a selection.” The social network is also adding an option for young users to choose who can download their public videos.

With all of this said and now put out of the way, the important thing to know is that there is still a long way to go before TikTok can claim to be completely safe for children. It has been found that social media in general is very harmful to people who are still developing their brains, and more steps need to be taken to reduce the damage being done to teenagers. Regardless, this is still a very responsible move by TikTok, setting an example for other social media platforms.

Read next: TikTok plans to roll out the Stories feature, which will be similar to Stories on Snapchat and Facebook’s own Instagram