THINGS TO CONSIDER IN USING THE TIKTOK APP
TikTok is undeniably known by almost all ages in over 143 countries worldwide. Its dominance has been proven since it became one of the most downloaded and popular video sharing app across the globe. With just a short span of time, after merging with another popular app i.e. Musical.ly, TikTok has already over a billion of monthly active users.
Thus, it has also been considered to be a great platform for businesses to promote their products and extend their target market. Some business marketers even collaborate with TikTok influencers to locally and internationally sell their products and services. They oftenly buy shares in tiktok to reach their desired target and to get more popularity with their brands. Especially now that TikTok just recently added an advertising feature where companies can expand their niche in this apps users.
However, despite being beneficial to both businesses and its users, there are still risks that must be taken into consideration as well. These risks are as follows:
- TikTok has been under a fire with the issue of collecting children information under 13 years old. This resulted into a huge fine from the US Federal Trade Commission and a great criticism from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office. Thus, TikTok has now limit their age requirement to be 13 years old and above and does not require much personal information from their users to minimize the data collection as well as to reduce the risk of data breach.
- Since most users of TikTok are teenagers, having a messaging feature actually paved a way for teenagers to receive sexual messages from strangers. This was also an issue TikTok had faced previously because they weren’t able to remove and filter such sexual abuse. Hence, TikTok had included in their main guidelines a section that focuses on safety of the minors. They even added a feature that prevents users under 16 years old to send and receive private messages in order to lessen this issue. However, some young users would still want to fake their age making it hard for TikTok to address and eliminate such concern.
- TikTok is also popular because of the trends and various challenges set among its users. It is actually the main source of trending dance challenges which has been introduced in other social media platforms as well. Nonetheless, there are other challenges which can be harmful and dangerous to the user’s safety such as Skullbreaker Challenge and the Outlet Challenge. TikTok even received a lot of flak for allowing these challenges to go viral and be followed by all other users globally.
Therefore, it is important especially for parents to guide their children in using this app. It is advisable that before your children register for a TikTok account, you must guide them in filtering the topics that will be mostly featured in their “For You” page. You can as well make sure your children will provide their correct date of birth so that TikTok will be able to filter only the suitable features intended for them.