TikTok announced that it has started the rollout of a new audience control feature which gives creators the ability to restrict their videos to adult viewers. Hitherto, the adult-only audience controls feature was only available for TikTok Live. TikTok says it will expand the feature globally over the coming weeks.
The social media giant stated that the new feature was in line with the company’s strict policies prohibiting nudity, sexual activity, and sexually explicit content, including content that directs to adult websites or apps.
TikTok says it has over 40,000 dedicated trust and safety professionals work to develop and enforce these policies and build processes and technologies to detect, remove or restrict violative content at scale.
It restates that its goal has always been to make sure its community, especially teens on its platform, have a safe, positive and joyful experience when they come to TikTok. “We’ve already taken significant strides to help ensure their feeds are full of content that is appropriate for them, and these improvements mark an important next step to meet that goal.”
The social media platform has been under constant criticism that is is not doing enough to protect minors from exposure to sexual content and pornographic websites
TikTok also announced in its blog post that it was investing in automation, specifically iterating on its machine learning models to improve their consistency and accuracy in detecting sexually explicit, suggestive, or borderline content. The “aim is to quickly identify and remove violative content from our platform and prevent borderline or suggestive content from being recommended to or searchable by teen accounts. “
“We’re making progress to reduce the prevalence of borderline or suggestive content recommendations overall, and are now launching the next iteration of our borderline suggestive model which we expect to improve detection of such content, therefore creating a more appropriate and comfortable experience for teen account holders.”
Last year, TikTok began to the introduction of its Content Levels system, which is designed to prevent certain content with more mature or complex themes (such as content containing profanity, adult innuendo, or sexually suggestive content) from reaching audiences between ages 13-17 (teen accounts).
“This is similar to other forms of media and platforms that use content ratings standards, except we’ve taken additional steps to help prevent teen accounts from viewing more mature content. As we’ve identified content as sexually suggestive or explicit, we’ve prevented teen accounts from viewing over 1 million overtly sexually suggestive videos in the last 30 days alone.”
