TikTok: All under-16s' accounts made private

TikTok's moderation team is pretty on point. Far better than any social network I've ever used before.

I don't think the commenters who say they only get weird or bad content actually know how TikTok works, or how to use it. You can't just scroll your FYP and expect to get new content, you have to go out of your way to find it. FYP is just a feedback loop of videos you keep watching.

If you want to start getting more queer content, for example, start searching the #lgbt or similar tags and watching/liking/commenting. Your FYP changes really quick.

I appreciate a lot my comment is apples vs oranges (because times are very different) - but I can still remember using MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for the first time. They all started pretty wholesome and pretty great before 'the real world' kind of seeped in.

Early Twitter (in particular) was a game changer for me, who was working from home for the second time in my life. I had people to talk to and bounce things off and all of a sudden work wasn't so lonely (as I had been the first time I tried). There was a genuine community feel without all the snark and unpleasantness.

I don't use TikTok, but I hope they'll be prescient enough to see where the others have struggled and keep on top their content policies, communities and moderation.

I have seen this play out on Instagram a few years ago.

Stage 1: The person is relatable, the videos are simple and to the point.

Stage 2: The following has grown, and the person now posts more frequently, however the quality/humor/personal touches are reduced. Less content about fitness, more about personal lifestyle

Stage 3: Monetization. Workout PDFs, constant advertising of fitness products (protein shakes, weight belts, etc), lots of hollow 'motivation' posts. The audience keeps growing, but the community has disappeared.

This isn’t much unlike the question of moderation in regards to Parler for example. We need to talk about all views and ideas and opinions, whether it’s political or about your mental health. Well, maybe sometimes it’s both.

But you can’t bar talking about it because sometimes it’s bad. It’s tough.

Not saying you’re wrong at all. Just suggesting there’s a lot of nuance here and it’s difficult to manage. Your point is very correct and important.

He specifically said there is a support network for him thru tiktok. How can you say ‘keep watching those videos are bad for you’. That is dismissive at best.

There really are so many trash self-help internet communities in the wild. These algorithms are amazing at placing people that share an interest in re-experiencing their buried childhood insecurities together and hire the most active commiserators to build their community.

It definitely doesn't seem like the communities that actually help each other gain a sense of security required to pause and self-reflect and unpack their issues get very popular because the click-optimizing algorithms don't give them a chance.

> If you are depressed or self harm, maybe keep watching those videos are bad for you.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but please don't judge that sort of thing until you've gone through it.

There are many online communities that seem dangerous or destructive to people who haven't gone through the issues, but are actually incredibly helpful to those who do.

I agree with you - it rewards attention seeking behavior and short attention spans.

That said I understand the term of good quality - in that it isn't vitriolic political messaging, conspiracy theories etc. It's mostly devoid of any true meaning - more like entertaining, sometimes hilarious content. I wouldn't say it's enlightening or provides much educational value. As I said early it also probably reinforces short attention span, attention seeking dopamine feed back loops... likely long term damage to brain development.

Just my opinion, no facts here.

You have to scroll through for maybe ten minutes and interact with posts that you actually like. Their system very quickly figures out what to show you. The general population of tiktok videos is pretty bad.

Tiktok has exceedingly powerful filter bubble effects. As a result, the nearly universally derided "straight-tiktok" (which is where you start and dominated by conventional social media influencers) is fundamentally different than other parts of the app.

My fyp is a combination of good natured dancing, linguistics, crowd sources music, hank green, a few comedy creators who engage positively with mental health and feminist topics, and animals doing silly things, recently a lot of possums. That's interspersed with memes and jokes, but very few that are particularly rude.

I know I risk sounding offensive but please accept that this is just an honest inquiry. Have you considered that you are causing that sort of content to hit your “for you page” by how your engaging with it? I ask because if someone asked me for a description of what’s most on tiktok based on what is in my feeds, it would be woodworking, cooking, arduinio projects and 3D printing stuff, with a bit of stand-up and DnD. I didn’t set any preferences or such to make it so, it just ender up that way through what I liked and the half a dosen people I follow.

I am in no way under the illusion that this is what most see. But i have to question if people that complain about Charlie Damelio and similar people being shown too much, just aren’t spending a lot of time watching the videos, commenting and liking them. If you scroll past they stop popping up.

Overall the content creators I see content from seem extremely good for these smaller niche communities.

As a plus, the most unbiased source of content for the BLM protests I found was tiktok, because it was just livestreams and videos from the protests with little possibility to editorialize it. Instead of anchors screaming “violent!” Or sternly saying “peaceful!” You got streamers on spot showing exactly how violent or peaceful certain situations were.

In the end of the day, it is entertainment business, that pretty much sums it up. Hollywood isn't better when it comes to attention seeking behavior.

Don't mobile phones have decent parental controls?

Both iPhone and Android have parental protection that allows you to block apps (though on Android it might be too easy to circumvent)

I use the Family Link feature on Android, so my kids have to ask for permission before they install a new app.

(IANAP -- this is not parenting advice ;) I speak mostly as a newly-minted adult who still remembers what it was like to be a child, when my world was small, so small decisions felt very important, especially when they were made without my input)

Children are people too, just with less experience. Your goal really isn't just "ban TikTok", it's "raise my children to develop healthy habits on their own and to recognize when they are being manipulated."

So, even if you ultimately decide to enforce parental controls, I hope you will bring your children into the decision-making process. Have an honest dialogue with your children about your concerns, and develop a space where they are free to share their own thoughts and feelings without fear of judgement. It's important that your mind is not already made up before you sit down at the table, as they'll sense it immediately. Repeat this often, and make it easy for anyone (yourself included) to express that their perspective has changed. Set a good example (by e.g. not using social media yourself) and apologize when you are wrong, so that your children learn that it's safe to do the same.

Encourage them to pursue healthier alternatives. Allow them to experiment and learn from their mistakes.

On my home network, I run a transparent, MITM squid proxy with a whitelist for my 8 year old son. My intention is to gradually loosen the restriction as he gets older, in stages: first switch it to a blacklist, then lift all restrictions but continue to log, then remove the proxy altogether and allow him free, unmonitored internet access. I will change it at whatever times seem appropriate - I'm new to this, ofc, and I don't know when it will be.

I have no intention of letting him have a mobile device any time soon, but if and when I feel it's appropriate/necessary, I have the option of giving him a "managed" device (i.e. like a corporate device) with always-on wireguard to my home network, routing traffic through the same proxy. I haven't tried setting up a device like this yet, but the necessary capabilities appear to be present in both iOS and Android. This will also allow me to control which apps can be installed on the device.

I am of course entirely open with him about this, including the technical aspects of how it works, and frequently discuss all of the many issues involved. My goal is not to hide reality from him or to instill some unreasonable fear of what's out there - quite the opposite. It's to try and help him arrive at a healthy relationship with the internet as an adult, something that most adults I know (including me) have so far failed to establish.

And yes, of course it's possible to circumvent all of this stuff (although quite a lot harder with what I have than with the vast majority of parental control solutions). And yes, I can only control the technologies he has access to that I manage. But you have to consider the "threat model" here. He doesn't rail against this restriction. He understands it. If he wants access to something he asks for it. If I say no, I explain why, and he accepts it. We'll see how that develops over time, but it's certainly not the case that "It's technically possible to circumvent it, ergo there's no point doing it".

There's a strangely defeatist attitude I see about this, often voiced alongside a false dichotomy: that what we need to do is teach our children responsibility instead of using technology to protect them. As I see it, both are needed - and the latter, while difficult, is possible. Unfortunately it currently requires skills that are far from universal. It would be much easier if people took the need for it seriously and developed better technologies for it.

There are people on this post saying about dubious content on Tik Tok that you "only see it if you like it". That's not good enough. Internet technologies lead you on in subtle ways. As an example, my son is massively into Lego. When he was 6 he discovered Lego videos on youtube and started watching them on our smart TV. After a while I realised that all of the models he was making were weapons, mostly guns. It reached a particularly bizarre moment when he handed me an (awesome, obviously!) lego butterfly knife he had made. I checked the videos he'd been watching and all of them were Lego weapon tutorials. Now, my reaction here isn't "omg weapons how horrible!". Not at all. It is, however, to note that through youtube's algorithms a general interest in Lego became laser-focussed on one, perhaps slightly dubious, genre of models.

Among other things, I want my son to understand this kind of subtle shaping/guiding influence that technology can have on its users, and until I feel he has developed sufficient awareness I want to be in a position to know and to intervene if I think he's being led by it in directions I don't approve of. At this stage in his life, I feel that is my responsibility and it would be wrong of me not to at least attempt to live up to it.

The algorithm does not know that you're watching horrified or enjoying the video. They can just tell that you stopped scrolling for an extra amount of seconds.

No, it starts out by showing you popular, random or slightly profiled content ("you appear to be a male in the 40s, so let's start here"), and then just maximizes the content types you were shown that would increase screen time.

This has nothing to do with your preferences/what you like. It doesn't care if you feel disgust, as long as the app stays open.

Suggestion/auto feeds are designed to abuse human psychology to maximize time wasted, not interest.

That sounds like YouTube.

It is nonsensical to impute anything about a person's character from what shows up in their feed, a result of black-box algorithms. This feels like the beginning of a witchhunt.

This is not a counterargument. What if your kids end up in that bubble?

And what if your kid ends up in that bubble? What if your kid likes one animal torture video and then the algorithm decides that they should see that on a daily basis?

You’re comparing your wife’s experience with GP’s experience. I’d be curious to see what your feed would look like after some use.

It's designed so you'll use it every day for 6 months.

> It tells more about what kind of content you are liking and watching than anything else.

This sounds very much like victim-blaming, I don't think it's appropriate to side with TikTok on this.

The content your parent comment refers to was (partly) what I saw when I installed it and scrolled through the default suggestions before it had the chance to learn anything about me. Sure there was a lot of harmless and just silly stuff, but the amount of animal abuse like https://twitter.com/noellesdesigns/status/122443946827220992... that scrolled by made me stop using the app.

Would you trust the algorithms to tailor most content appropriately for a kid?

People say things like this in an attempt at shaming the original poster but one thing not considered is the location of the person using TikTok.

I live in a big city and most of the feed is highly sexualised, highly political, or highly prank-related.

My friend that lives in a small town about 100 miles away has to essentially send me fun tiktok videos and, no matter how many likes I do of those videos, the base diet of sexual, political, or prank-related videos are always there.

I think OP’s point is that there is plenty of questionable media on Tik-Tok.

Your point about what they like is irrelevant to that point.

I got a few animal abuse videos in an hour or so of swiping. It shows you these random videos in case you are interested. A few of these was enough to uninstall. I tried again some months later, and after awhile the recommendations get a little better, but there is still the occasional piece of awful content that gets thrown in there. In all cases I swiped past as quickly as possible.

I don't think it tells you anything about what the commenter likes. When I created a TikTok account it showed me nothing that interested me. I marked videos as "not interesting" for half an hour before giving up.

Mine is full of fitness instructors showing of their fitness challenges,dancers showing of their synchronized dance routines, and oddball humour. I had a moment where some BLM stuff trended but on the whole it seemed to show both sides (albeit a bit the extreme versions of both sides).

I've heard people describe a situation in ML (could be hill climbing) where an optimising algorithm will get stuck in a valley. At that point it will try various things in order to get unstuck, often involving a good dose of randomness. What's to say this didn't happen to op or that you really won't start seeing recommendations for Indian train death videos?

If the content is harmful it's harmful...

It is actually quite easy to have Youtube delete content (doling out a strike in the process) that doesn't violate CG/ToS using false reports.

Why is a girl in a school uniform a hard no? Sorry, must have missed some key piece of information here.

Obviously a kids app is a bad place to sell liquor.

Some of these comments seem to be complaining that

a) snakes gotta eat, and, b) children often wear school uniform.

The reason you should want to keep children and alcohol apart is because alcohol is a drug, not because you think school-children are inherently sexualised.

It's the age where the majority of legal systems draw the line on considering a teenager to be an adult, so it isn't unreasonable.

I think there is some research that maturity kicks in around 25. Something to do with neo frontal cortex development.

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...

>Is 18 some magic age where people wisen up?

Yes, to the extent we accept it so much we made it into law. Though the law does seem to pick a few different age groups for other things based on a seemingly arbitrary standard. Lower for driving, even though bad driving could kill innocent bystanders. Higher for smoking, even though smoking only kills yourself. You can even sign up and join the military a year before you are able to vote for the politicians who control it.

Canada does not have states.

To latch onto this comment, a lot of countries have slowly increased the age of maturity over time; in my country, the minimum drinking age has gone up to 18 (from 16 for light alcohol), while at the same time the age you can start learning to drive has gone down to 17 or 17,5 (you can practice in simulators at that point iirc). Just to name some examples.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure people are allowed to stay children for longer nowadays, instead of being told to marry and work in the coal mines in their early-to-mid teens.

More cynically / conspiratorial / on the other hand, people are kept infantilized as well as a means of control by various parties in whose interest it is to keep a population docile and dumb. Can't overthrow the government if you've got scantily clad teens to watch.

Different folks parent in different ways. Some consider it protecting their children against online bullying/unsafe content. From my perspective, the idea that I'd give my teenager a mobile device with carte-blanche connectivity sounds ridiculous. I wouldn't dare tell another parent to adopt my views.

I once felt this way, until my 10 year old got a TikTok account. The problem is that my children do not have the ability under the law to enter into any kind of agreement with anyone. Only legal guardians do.

I would not call them "competent and effective", but they're a bull in a china shop to be sure.