TikTok announces new child safety update that will test organizing content by maturity level

• TikTok announced it will soon assign maturity scores to organize content by age appropriateness.
• TikTok has a large youth userbase, surpassing other large social media platforms.

TikTok says it is rolling out an early version of a major update that will organize content by maturity level, in the hopes of keeping mature content away from underage users.

The planned update was announced with a few other changes to the platform on Wednesday, including letting users filter out specific words and hashtags they don't want to see on their homepage.

In a blog post about the update, TikTok compared its age guideline concept to the way films and video games are often arranged by maturity rating, but said "we need to develop an approach unique to TikTok."

Multiple social media platforms have begun to limit or monitor the content available to younger users, following widespread criticism of companies such as Instagram and TikTok for creating unsafe digital spaces for teenagers and children. The US government is currently investigating the way TikTok deals with child sex abuse material on the platform and a privacy feature that predators are taking advantage of, according to a Financial Times report.

It's unclear whether TikTok's update will block users from simply circumventing the change by saying they are older than they actually are when they create an account.

"When we detect that a video contains mature or complex themes, for example, fictional scenes that may be too frightening or intense for younger audiences, a maturity score will be allocated to the video to help prevent those under 18 from viewing it across the TikTok experience,' Cormac Keenan, TikTok's Head of Trust and Safety, wrote in the blog post.

TikTok has a huge teen userbase, surpassing other massive social media platforms. In 2021, a youth survey conducted by the research and advisory firm Forrester found that 63% of Americans between 12 and 17 used TikTok, while only 57% used Instagram.

TikTok, which features an array of different trends and content genres, has a long history of spawning mature content, from trends involving lip-syncing sexual lyrics and dangerous physical challenges to Christian fascist meme propaganda and other disinformation. In the last year, multiple potentially harmful crazes have grown popular on the app, including the milk crate challenge, where users made videos of themselves attempting to climb up wobbly pyramids of crates.

Other fads have involved people sticking garlic cloves up their noses to relieve nasal congestion and users eating bottles of frozen corn syrup, which a doctor and a nutritionist, respectively, previously told Insider could have negative health consequences.

There are also privacy concerns surrounding TikTok, which is run by the Chinese company ByteDance, both about who has access to users' data and what is being done with it. In 2021, the former Children's Commissioner for England sued TikTok for billions of pounds, accusing it of violating data protection law by illegally amassing large swaths of data from child users.

There has also been a significant amount of moral panic around TikTok content, however, with media coverage running stories about dangerous trends on the platform that either originated on other social media sites or do not appear as widespread as news outlets present.