TikTok is introducing a suite of new parental controls, community notes and AI enhancements that aim to make the short-form video social media platform safer for teens, the company said in a press release on Wednesday.
Family pairing, a feature that allows parents to monitor their teen’s TikTok accounts, will now notify parents when their teens upload videos, stories or photos. It’ll also let parents know which featured topics their teens have chosen to fill their feeds.
TikTok has long allowed parents to put time restrictions on their teens’ accounts. Now, with Well-being Missions, TikTok says that the app can help build positive reinforcement habits. Made in collaboration with its Global Youth Council and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, the app will gamily mindfulness, giving teens badges for completing certain in-app well-being experiences.
Creators also have some new tools to take advantage of. TikTok has introduced AI tools to help moderate their comments sections and make the overall experience more pleasant. This includes Creator Care Mode which, with the help of AI, can learn the types of comments creators dislike to automatically start filtering them out. While doing a TikTok Live stream, creators can now bulk-mute certain emojis or phrases that might be used to insult or harass.
For creators with large followings, the Creator Inbox can help curate messages and allow creators to manage their inbox and bulk-reply to fans. Similar to Instagram’s Broadcast Channel feature, TikTok will have what it calls the Creator Chat Room, which allows creators to have one large chatroom with their fans.
Given the influx of misinformation online, TikTok is looking to employ similar models that of X and Meta, which leverages their communities to fact-check posts. The feature is called Footnotes, and it’ll work similarly to the community notes feature found on X and Facebook. Footnotes is launching as a pilot in the US and those who’ve signed up for the contributor community program can help verify if the information found on a post is accurate, including linking to a reliable source.
Unlike Meta, which got rid of its fact checking teams entirely earlier this year, TikTok will still keep its fact-checking teams around and presses that Footnotes will be a supplement, not a solution, to fact verification. TikTok works with 20 International Fact Checking Network-accredited fact-checking partners in 60 languages over 130 markets.
TikTok referred to its blog posts when asked for comment.
TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, has been around since 2016 but saw a major surge in popularity during the pandemic. The short-form video platform has 1.59 billion users globally, 170 million of which are in the US. Being Chinese-owned, it’s been railed against by politicians and regulators for its influence among US users. The fear is that TikTok could act as a backdoor into people’s devices or that its algorithm could influence the public against the US government and its interests.
During Trump’s first term, he threatened to ban the app from the US. It was Biden who signed a bipartisan law in April of 2024 demanding ByteDance sell off TikTok to a US company or face a ban. When Trump was running for reelection, however, he claimed the app was helpful towards his campaign efforts. Trump also received donations from Jeff Yass, a billionaire and co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, who owns 7% of ByteDance. Instead of letting the ban go into effect, Trump has instead has given extensions to TikTok to find a US buyer. Trump is currently on his third 90-day extension, which is set to end on Sept. 17.