TikTok has announced that, in the coming weeks, it will block children’s access to “some” beauty filters that allow you to change the user’s appearance. The objective is to prevent these types of tools from continuing to harm the mental health of minors who use the service.
The Chinese technology company has reached this conclusion, as announced in a releaseafter commissioning the realization of a study to the British non-profit firm Internet Matters. This sought to examine the role of online platforms in shaping the identity and relationships of adolescents.
Among the conclusions of the report is that both young TikTok users and their parents are concerned about the effects that beauty filters, capable of “distorting reality”, can have on the mental health of users, which in many cases Sometimes they are not aware that the image is altered. The study also collects the testimonies of several minors surveyed.
«I tried an effect… that made my lips look bigger. I went from never having had anything against my lips to not being able to look at them without having the feeling that they are too small and that they should look more like the effect,” says a 17-year-old Swedish user about the effect that using it had on her. of filters.
TikTok has also committed to showing more information to users about how a beauty effect changes the look of creators who use it. “This is in addition to the proactive notification that is already made to users when certain effects have been used in the content,” they conclude from the ‘app’.
The social network, however, will continue without putting barriers to access to “funny” or “obvious” filters, that is, those in which the user is clear from the first moment that they are not real. This is where, for example, the effects of animal ears come in.
New technology to detect children under 13 years of age
The company has also announced that it is developing its own technology, based on artificial intelligence, to prevent minors under 13 years of age, the minimum age allowed, from opening an account in the application. “This technology will help detect accounts that may belong to someone under the age of 13 so that a specially trained moderator can review the account and delete it if they believe that someone does not meet our minimum age,” the social network states in the statement.
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