TikTok’s Family Safety Tools Empowering Teens and Parents for a Safer Digital Experience
TikTok is committed to building a safe, creative, and inclusive environment for all users—especially teenagers. As digital platforms increasingly become part of young people’s daily lives, it’s crucial that they remain safe and secure spaces. That’s why TikTok continues to strengthen its global efforts to support youth safety through in-app protections, proactive policies, and features that promote healthy digital habits. In this article, we’ll highlight the safety tools TikTok has developed to help teens and their guardians ensure a safe online experience.
Account Settings
To help support teens’ online presence, TikTok offers various personal and account management settings. Accounts of users under the age of 16 are automatically set to private, and they have control over who can send follow requests. They can also manage who can view their videos, send them messages, or leave comments. Additionally, TikTok allows users to request a copy of their data—including profile information and activity—through downloadable data settings for enhanced transparency and control.
Image: TikTok
A key tool for families is Family Pairing, which enables parents or guardians to link their accounts with their teens’ accounts. This feature provides a range of parental controls, including screen time limits, filtering searched video keywords, restricted mode, and direct messaging controls. Through these settings, guardians and teens can work together to build responsible and secure online behavior.
Community Controls
To improve safety, TikTok empowers users with detailed controls over their social interactions. Teen users can choose who can view their videos—whether it’s just themselves, friends, or followers. For direct messaging, they can choose to allow messages from everyone, friends only, or no one at all. The comment controls also let them decide who can comment on their videos—friends, everyone, or no one.
In addition, users can turn on comment filters to automatically hide offensive remarks or customize filtering based on keywords. Users have full control to report comments or videos that violate community guidelines, block other users, or remove followers.
Interactive features like Duets and Stitches can also be managed, allowing users to decide who can collaborate or respond to their content. These comprehensive controls give teenagers the ability to shape their online environment while still enjoying meaningful interactions.
