TikTok is continuing its efforts towards family safety on the platform in a brand-new campaign with influential creator, Karen Wazen. #FamilyFirst sees Karen Wazen putting her own creative spin on the popular trend of speaking to her future self, where she deliberates how best to support and safeguard her children when they turn 13 and are able to create their own TikTok accounts. The collaboration aims to highlight TikTok’s unique family pairing feature, which allows parents and teens to customize their safety settings based on individual needs.
The campaign is also underscored by improvements to key features such as DMs, notifications, watch and download settings aimed at teenage users, forming an important part of TikTok’s ongoing endeavours to support and care for the safety of youths on the platform.
Hany Kamel, content operations director at TikTok MENA said, “We see immense value in partnering with our leading family creators such as Karen to drive awareness around the crucial subject of youth safety online. Creativity spans multi-generations and has the power to bring families together through personal moments and fun memories. Through our #FamilyFirst campaign, we want to continue encouraging these beautiful family moments, but in a positive and safe way that benefits all”.
Since its launch, families across the region have taken advantage of the enhanced safety controls that Family Pairing has offered parents including Restricted Mode, Screen Time Management and Comments. Family Pairing enhances TikTok’s suite of safety tools for younger users and complements its work to provide greater access to product features as users reach key milestones for digital literacy.
Furthermore, TikTok also believes in the importance of ensuring even stronger proactive protections to help keep teenagers safe, by introducing changes to support age-appropriate experiences on the platform. This includes introducing a new set of changes for users aged 13-17 to further enhance these proactive protections over the coming months.
New changes to Direct Messaging privacy settings
In order to help teens make active decisions about their privacy settings when users aged 16-17 join TikTok, their Direct Messaging setting will now be set to ‘No One’ by default.
Decide who can watch videos
To help teens understand the sharing options available to them, TikTok is now adding a pop-up that appears when teenagers under the age of 16 are ready to publish their first video, asking them to choose who can watch the video. They won’t be able to publish their video until they make a selection.
Choose who can download public videos
If teens opt to turn the feature on, they’ll now receive a pop-up asking them to confirm that choice before others can download their videos. Note that downloads are permanently disabled on content from accounts under the age of 16.
A mindful approach to push notifications
Accounts aged 13-15 will not receive push notifications from 9 pm and accounts aged 16-17 will have push notifications disabled starting at 10 pm.
TikTok’s suite of safety features continues to build on its ongoing commitments to families and there is no finish line when it comes to protecting the safety, privacy, and well-being of its community. By working with teens, community organisations, parents and creators to further innovate, people from all walks of life continue to come to TikTok to be entertained, spark joy in their every day, and share their creativity with others.
To learn more about Safety on TikTok, visit the Safety Center.
