You can now make your Children’s’ TikTok Account Private.

Update: 31/1/2023

Parents & Caregivers we have received a number of reports about students creating fake Tiktok/Instagram accounts about their school, other students, or teachers. 🚨

Police have said the videos uploaded to these accounts ‘had caused “real distress” to those targeted. They warned some of the content was abusive and may constitute a crime under misuse of telecommunications or harassment’

You might remember we did a previous blog post on the parental control tools TikTok rolled out here.

Well, time for an update – especially since settings and features on apps like Tiktok change quite regularly.  So it’s important to not get caught out – and to use the safety tools available. So TikTok have now added the Family Pairing feature for parents – which at this point looks really good.

Kids Spending More Time on TikTok than Youtube

Now firstly, before we get into the ins and outs of how Family Pairing works, it’s important for parents and carers to be aware that while we all know TikTok is an insanely popular platform,

‘TikTok’s users now spend more time each month watching content than YouTube users’

according to The Verge’s article quoting app analytics firm ‘App Annie’.

Now I know parents and carers are busy folks so I’ll cut to the chase with a quick overview on how it works.

I’d encourage you to take a look at it and consider setting it up if your kids are on Tiktok.

What is Family Pairing?

Family pairing allows parents and teenagers the ability to customise their safety settings.  According to Jeff Collins, Trust & Safety, San Francisco Bay Hub ‘It is part of our continued work toward providing parents a better ability to guide their teen’s online experience while allowing time to educate about online safety and digital citizenship’.

Now credit where credits due, TikTok has been one of the few social media apps to make such tools available.  However, it’s also important to note as spotted on a recent article on Tech Crunch ‘Snapchat is preparing to introduce a new parental control feature dubbed ‘Family Center’ so that’s another one we’ll give an overview on when it’s launched.

How does TikTok’s Family Pairing work?

Family pairing allows a parent to link their TikTok account to their teens (good job this is a parents and carers blog, or teens eyes would be rolling as we speak). Now just hear me out for a moment.

I know many parents and carers have no interest in TikTok but setting up an account gives you access to the tools below, so for that alone it’s worth setting up an account to help keep your 13yr old+ safe (and let’s be honest, in reality there’ll be pressure on from your 9 year old to let them join Tiktok – so if you bow under the pressure at least put this in place).

Family Pairing allows parents access to:

• Set screen time boundaries – Control how long your teen can spend on TikTok each day
• Restricted Mode – Limit the appearance of content that may not be appropriate for all audiences. While this is not perfect it’s better than having noting in place.
• Direct Messages – Restrict who can send messages to the connected account, or turn off direct messaging completely.
• Private or Public account – Choose whether your teenager can have a private or public account.

Want to see a step-by-step video on how to set TikTok Family Pairing up?  Click on the image below to get access to this practical video but all my online safety and digital wellbeing resources via our handy smartphone app.  You can also book a 1 to 1 session by clicking here 

Take care online,

Wayne

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