The protection of minors is a important and delicate topic for TikTok, both because it is an important and delicate topic for all platforms and because the ByteDance social network was in some way created specifically to address younger people, and because it is a topic on which TikTok has often ended up (and still is) in the sights of the authorities.
The latest innovation in this sense is the creation of the TikTok Youth Councildescribed as “a new initiative that will further strengthen how we build our app to be safe for teens.”
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The requests of adolescents and their parents
As explained, the announcement comes at the same time as the results are released again global study conducted by YouGov on over 12 thousand teenagers between 13 and 17 years old and their parents, which reveals a greater desire to work together on digital platforms.
Created in collaboration with the British Praesidio Safeguardingthe Youth Council is a sort of Youth Council, it is made up of 15 young people between the ages of 15 and 18 from different communities and countries (such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Indonesia, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico and Morocco), yes met for the first time in December 2023 and organized a second meeting which it attended also Shou Chew, the CEO of TikTok (photo at top of page).
As for the research, he looked at the families’ conversations about online safety in general and revealed that the majority talk, at least once a week, about the use of online services by teenagers (77% of parents and 69% of Italian teenagers declare this). And yet, Italian teenagers admitted to feeling uncomfortable in having these conversations with adults, and in particular topics such as bullying (in 22% of cases), body image (39%) and time spent in front of the screen in 31%. Conversely, it would be easier for parents to discuss discrimination (56%), religion (54%), alcohol and substance abuse (51%) and bereavement (34%) than online safety.
Among other interesting data emerging from the YouGov and TikTok study, relating to Italy: the fact that 74% of teenagers believe they are able to stay safe online but also think that platforms should create spaces to listen directly to them about this and allow them to contribute to the decision-making process (an answer given by 61% of the sample); or that almost half of Italian parents would like more support from schools on online safety, while over a third would like more control over their children’s online accounts.
From this point of view, that of the so-called parental control (here is our guide)33% of teenagers said that parents set a limit on the time they spend on screen, 31% of mothers and fathers have the access code for their children’s phone, 32% follow kids on platforms online and 28% ask their children to show their profiles or feeds on various social networks.
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Social and minor, the things that TikTok will do (and does).
During the first meeting of the TikTok YouTh Council, the kids reportedly talked about the importance of educational initiatives on these themes, therefore during 2024 the platform will give life to “beyond 10 literacy campaigns in-app media around the world,” which “will focus on misinformation and AI-generated content.”
That’s not all, because TikTok already has its own space, called Family Connectionwhich allows parents to keep an eye on what their children are doing on the platform: “To encourage more people to consult our parenting tools, we reported this to hundreds of millions of people in our app – they explained by the company – Now we show it to every new member of the community over the age of 35 when you sign up”
All this is part of a social network which, as we have often written on Italian Tech, is already quite active in the protection of the little ones among its users: TikTok is widely the platform stricter both in content moderation both in the so-called age-gating, i.e. the action of filtering and controlling the age of users; Furthermore, already in January 2021TikTok was the first among the large social platforms to make all new and existing accounts of 13-15 year olds private by default.
@capoema