TikTok has announced a bevvy of new product features aimed at reinforcing safety, privacy, and community well-being. These tools are designed to enhance the experience for everyone, from teens and families to the creators who are the heart of the platform’s vibrant, growing communities. With a growing user base, the platform faces a clear responsibility to ensure a safe and supportive environment for all.
Better Parenting Tools for Families
Teen accounts on TikTok already have a variety of features and settings designed for their safety. TikTok is giving parents better oversight by introducing new features for its “Family Pairing” tool. This feature will allow parents and guardians to customise a teen’s account to better fit the family’s boundaries of acceptable content. These new features are all about providing parents with greater visibility without disrupting a teen’s creativity or independence.
Parents can now automatically receive a notification when their teen uploads a new video, story, or photo that is visible to others on the platform. They will also have greater insight into the privacy settings their teen selects, such as whether downloads for their content are enabled or if their following list is visible to others. Additionally, a teen can now alert a parent if they report a video on the app.
Empowering Creators with New Controls
It’s not just families that are getting better protections. TikTok is also introducing new features that enhance Creator safety and protection.
A standout new feature is Creator Care Mode, a control that automatically filters out inappropriate, offensive, and unwanted comments. It also learns from a creator’s own actions, such as deleting or reporting a comment. These actions will be used to tailor the filtering to their specific needs. For live streamers, a new LIVE Bulk Mute feature helps creators and moderators to bulk-mute comments by entering a keyword, phrase, or emoji.
TikTok is also introducing Content Check, which allows creators to pre-check if their content is likely to be ineligible for the “For You” feed before they upload it, helping them to better understand the platform’s rules. Other new tools include a professional-grade Creator Inbox and Creator Chat Room, designed to help creators manage messages more efficiently and interact directly with their followers.
Promoting Community Well-being and Integrity
Beyond safety for families and creators, TikTok is also investing in the well-being of its entire community. The company is introducing Well-being Missions, a series of short, engaging tasks designed to help people develop long-term, balanced digital habits. Users are encouraged to complete these missions by earning badges that reinforce and reward mindful behaviors.
Lastly, TikTok is also maintaining platform integrity through a new feature called Footnotes, which is being piloted in the U.S.. This feature draws on the collective knowledge of the community, allowing qualified users to add written context to content, which can then be rated as helpful by others.
While these new measures are a step toward making TikTok safer, their efficacy and impact on user experience need to be proven over time. However, it is notable that at a time when some platforms are either backtracking or reversing most of their fact-checking and community safety measures, TikTok is continuing to invest in these areas. The introduction of tools like Footnotes, which empower the community to collectively fact-check and add context to content, is a positive and proactive step in a challenging digital landscape.
