Over the past decade, social media has evolved from silly dog lenses to state-of-the-art beauty filters. The latter are at the heart of a new initiative by TikTok, a company that is currently being sued in 14 US states for negatively impacting young people’s mental health. Now, TikTok is taking a step to limit young people’s access to these appearance-changing effects: on Tuesday, the platform announced new restrictions governing the use of filters by users under the age of 18.
TikTok is restricting the use of “some appearance modification effects” for those in this age group-a vague promise whose scope will determine whether it will actually help young people or just improve TikTok’s image. The company also plans to expand the amount of information that each filter must contain about changes in a person’s appearance. In addition, TikTok is “refreshing” its guidelines for creators in TikTok Effects House on the impact of certain filters – again, vague, so we’ll have to see if it’s all talk or actually useful.
There is also the issue of finding and banning users under the age of 13. The company claims that it deletes six million accounts worldwide every month from users it suspects are underage. TikTok is also currently “researching” how to use machine learning to identify accounts created by people under 13, and then send them to a moderator for confirmation. A TikTok spokesperson confirmed that the company will first test this in the UK, while filter restrictions and recommendations should be rolled out globally in the coming weeks and months.
