TikTok is giving you more control over your ‘For You Page’ and introducing stronger content moderation for young users.
You will soon be able to specify specific words or hashtags you don’t want to see in your feed and the app will automatically filter them out.
The feature, similar to muting keywords and hashtags on Twitter, will give users more control over the content they are shown.
The platform is also rolling out two new automated moderation and filtering tools.
The first one is called Content Levels which ranks content based on ‘thematic maturity’ and is designed to keep mature content away from young users.
Similar to rating systems on movies or video games, this feature would warn or restrict mature content for minors.
The short-form video app is also taking measures to identify problematic trends and limit the number of videos related to them, especially ones that could be harmful to users.
TikTok’s main selling point is its eerily accurate ‘For You Page’ which has been criticised for encouraging unhealthy or dangerous trends.
Recently, the company was sued over a number of deaths of children trying the viral ‘blackout challenge’ on the platform.
‘TikTok has invested billions of dollars to intentionally design products that push dangerous content that it knows is dangerous and can result in the deaths of its users,’ stated the lawsuit.
The platform already has the option to ‘dislike’ a video on your For Your Page, along with a ‘Not Interested’ button to limit videos from a particular user or containing a particular sound. The new features will give users more control over what they see but possibly also make the app’s recommendations even more accurate.
The new word-based filters are currently only looking at video descriptions and text-based stickers but could get more advanced. Considering TikTok’s automatic captions are quite good, the platform could graduate to moderating videos based on their transcripts.
The new features are expected to be rolled out ‘in the coming weeks’.
Source: Read Full Article