Is TikTok Safe for Kids?

The head of trust and safety for TikTok, Suzy Loftus, came to Salt Lake City on October 22 and held a press event telling about the safety features on the TikTok app. Utah lawmakers said that the features don’t go far enough to protect our kids.

Loftus and her team have visited or will visit 17 cities before the end of 2024, hoping to set state and national politicians at ease about TikTok’s safety. Due to law signed by President Joe Biden in April, TikTok will be banned this coming January unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells the app to a non-Chinese company.

Utah actually filed two lawsuits against the Chinese-based company TikTok. The state has also passed legislation which hopes to protect children from some of the addictive features that are on the app and which would give parents tools to check up on their kids’ accounts. This law makes it so these students and their parents could bring a private “right of action” suit forward against any social media company, under certain conditions.

Loftus said 1.1 million Utahns are TikTok users. She indicated the heart of TikTok’s safety procedures begins with community guidelines. “We’re a community and we have rules like no bullying, harassment, or dangerous behavior.”

Some of their technology will recognize content that goes against community guidelines before it is posted. In other cases, such as misinformation or bullying, the technology forwards to a human moderator. She indicated that younger users who are not yet 16 know their TikToks cannot be downloaded and there is no direct messaging. For those under 18, the daily screen time is set to 60 minutes with no push notifications at night.

In order to sign up for TikTok, students have to put in their birthdate which the app then uses to apply age restrictions. Margaret Busse, executive director of Utah’s Department of Commerce attended the meeting and said there is a difference between age gating (asking for an age) and age verification. She pointed out Utah’s law requires age verification. “There are lots of different kinds of technologies to be able to do age verification that today these platforms could start using if they wanted, but they don’t want to,” Busse said.

In order for the app to be safe, Busse said that it needs to have meaningful age verification and certain settings to protect children’s data. She indicated they also needed to “get rid of their addictive features.” Some of those include push notifications, infinite scroll, and auto play.

Two legislators who have worked on the Utah legislation attended the meeting and spoke also. 

Jordan Teuscher, a South Jordan Representative to the Utah Legislature, has worked mostly on Utah’s social media legislation. He said parents worry that algorithms are too powerful and that kids find ways around restrictions.

Teuscher concluded, “They needed the government to come in and put some guardrails in place to be able to protect kids.” These restrictions can help parents to be proactive with their children’s social media usage. The overriding concern is that kids are on these platforms way too long and because they’re on the platform way too long, that impacts performance in school, that impacts sleep at night.”

Senator Michael McKell, representing Spanish Fork said, “When we look at the data, a child that’s been online for longer than three hours, their mental health starts to decline.’

Both legislators indicated that Utah would continue their lawsuit against TikTok until the company made some significant change in their product. “Utah won’t sit back and just watch what the courts do. The state will work side by side with other states to lead out in protecting children.” McKell stated.

Both Teuscher and McKell recommended looking at Utah’s website, socialharms.utah.gov, for more information.

– by Elaine Baldwin

Read past TikTok news in White House Turns to TikTok Influencers.