TikTok is a hugely popular Chinese video-sharing social network, used to create short lip-sync, comedy, and special talent videos.
While the app was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in markets outside of China. But TikTok has been saddled with thousands of sexually explicit comments found on videos posted by children as young as nine, which resulted the company to delete hundreds of these comments.
Albeit, the majority of users who posted the contents were still able to do so on the platform, even with TikTok's rules against sexual messages targeted at children.
How TikTok's new Parental Control features will help to Solve the Issue?
TikTok has recently introduced a set of new parental controls called “Family Safety Mode” that is designed to allow parents set limits on their teens' use of the mobile app. The parental control features include limits on direct messages, screen-time management controls, and a restricted mode to limit the appearance of inappropriate content.
The Family Safety Mode will require that parents must first create account on the app, which will then be linked to the teen’s account.
And if enabled, parents will be fully able to control their teens activities on the app, such as turning off or limiting what the teens can interact with, and who they can message; or even choose to turn TikTok’s “restricted” mode on to limit inappropriate content.
TikTok's Growing Generation Z Userbase
TikTok is increasingly dominated by the demographic cohort succeeding the Millennials and preceding Generation Alpha, the Generation Z, whose birth years fall on mid 1990s and mid-2010s as ending birth years, with the year 1997 as the most widely accepted beginning.
The Generation Z users make up about 60% of the app's US monthly users, with ages ranging between 16 to 24, according to Mediakix. These users typically share 15-second clips of themselves doing comedy skits, dancing, lip-syncing, or participating in challenges that regularly pop up on the platform.
TikTok's popularity among teens, combined with the unique potential for viral stardom, has forced parents to seek for ways to control the activities of their teens around everything from privacy to how their kids can actually benefit from the platform.
In a move to avail users some control, TikTok added a screen time management tool last year that allow users to set limits on the time spent on the platform every day. And this month, the company partnered with popular TikTok stars to create short videos to encourage users to track their time spent on the platform.
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