Short-form video platform TikTok has announced a number of new features which it puts under the trust and safety umbrella. Half of these are for families, and would fall under parental controls. The other half is more catered to content creators and managing their communities. With one exception, these features will be rolling out across the globe in the coming weeks and months.
New Family Pairing Features
Dealing with the first half first, these are naturally being bundled into the Family Pairing features. One involves notifying parents when their teen uploads a video, story or photo that’s visible to others on the platform. They will also gain better insight into their privacy settings on TikTok, such as if their following list is visible to others.
On that note, the platform says that parents will be able to block other users on their teens’ behalf. The children can request the unblocking of said users, but parents ultimately make the final call. Parents will also be able to see which topics that their teen has chosen for their feed under the Manage Topics feature.
Well-being missions
Then there’s well-being missions, which builds on the set of features under digital well-being. Rather than just restricting use, TikTok says that it wants adhering to the restrictions to also be rewarding, Therefore, clearing these well-being missions will earn users badges as rewards. The platform has mentioned this feature specifically as being rolled out today.
Creator Care Mode
Moving on to features for content creators, TikTok has announced a few related to chat and comment filtering. For the former, creators can mute words, phrases and emojis in bulk while live streaming. For the latter, it works in tandem with the default auto moderation tools to filter out offensive and unwanted comments. Both these features also get a sprinkle of AI to detect users who commonly enter comments that get muted or deleted. These users in turn also get muted or blocked.
On the flip side, content creators themselves get something called Content Check Lite. This helps creators check whether the content they are about to upload will get locked out of the For You feed.
Finally, TikTok announced Creator Inbox and Creator Chat Room. Think of the former like a email inbox in terms of what it adds, like Unread, Starred, and quick replies. For the latter, this should be similar to your average chat room experience on other services, like a Discord server. A creator can create up to 20 chat rooms with 300 members each, though this is specifically rated for 18+ users.
