TikTok announces a suite of trust and safety tools

Just as with the internet in general, concerns have been voiced about the safety of social media platforms. To help address these concerns, TikTok has unveiled a series of tools and features designed to help keep users safe and informed.

There are various new options which cater to different types of user. Some are for creators, others for parents who are worried about how their offspring are using TikTok. There are also features with a broader audience, notably Well-being Missions.

Parental controls have been central to trust across social media. Parents have a difficult balancing act of wanting to ensure access to technology and what it has to offer, but also wanting to remain informed and in control of online activity and interactions. This is something that TikTok’s latest announcements aim to do, building on existing tools.

Parents of younger TikTok users will be aware of the Family Pairing feature which is the platform’s take on parental controls. Now some new tools have been added to this so parents can better monitor the activity of their teenagers.

TikTok says of the new additions:

• Automatically notify a parent when their teen uploads a video, story, or photo that's visible to others on TikTok. This helps parents stay informed and start open conversations about what their teen is posting, without disrupting a teen's creativity or independence.
• Provide greater insight into the privacy settings their teen selects. For instance, parents will see if their teen (ages 16-17) has enabled downloads for their content, or if their following list is visible to others. They can also see which topics in our Manage Topics feature their teen has chosen to shape their feed.

For every social media platform, creators are vital. TikTok is no different, and a series of new creator-specific features improve protections. The number of new features here is longer:

• Creator Care Mode, which helps creators better filter out offensive and unwanted comments.
• A new mute feature for TikTok LIVE, that helps creators on LIVE to bulk mute words, phrases and emojis.
• Content Check Lite, which allows creators to pre-check whether their content is likely to be ineligible for the For You feed before they post it.
• Creator Inbox, a new professional inbox experience designed to help creators manage their messages more efficiently.
• Creator Chat Room, which allows creators to connect and interact directly with eligible followers on TikTok.

TikTok has followed the lead of the likes of X and Facebook, starting to turn to Footnotes to help bring more context to content. As the Footnotes experiment continues, users in the US who are in the Footnotes pilot program can start to write and rate footnotes on short videos. These footnotes can also be rated.

Expanding on digital wellness features like Screen Time Management and Sleep Hours, TikTok is gamifying social media safety. The company says:

But we hear from experts that long-term change often comes not just from restriction, but from positive reinforcement: building habits through encouragement, education, and a sense of progress. We consulted existing research, guidance from our global Youth Council, and conversations with experts like those from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital to develop our idea.

That's why today, we’re introducing a brand new feature called Well-being Missions. These are a series of short, engaging missions designed to help people develop long-term balanced digital habits. As people complete missions, they earn badges that encourage and reinforce mindful behaviors.

It is an interesting idea, and one that mimics an approach taken by learning apps such as Duolingo. Whether it is one that translates to social media usage is something that will become clear in time.