Youth safety and well-being

Millions of people around the world come to TikTok to create, share, discover, and connect. We are committed to creating a safe and inclusive platform for our community, and believe this work is especially important for our teenage users, ages 13-17. Our comprehensive approach to youth safety and well-being includes robust policies, innovative technologies, in-app features, and educational resources. We have a dedicated team of experts in child and adolescent development who help ensure that our Youth Safety and Well-Being policies are age-appropriate and developmentally suitable. We also implement stringent advertising policies to ensure that ads on our platform are age-appropriate.

Creating age-appropriate environments

You must be at least 13 years old to have an account on TikTok (or other ages as indicated in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service). We work collaboratively with industry partners, non-profits, academics, and governments to identify, implement, and share innovative solutions to better protect teens online. To ensure our work is informed by the insights and recommendations of young people themselves, we also launched TikTok's pioneering global Youth Council in partnership with specialist online safety agency Praesidio Safeguarding.

These are some of the deliberate decisions we've taken to build age-appropriate and developmentally suitable experiences that enable teens to have a safe space to create, share, discover, and connect:

Our Content Levels system builds on these protections and is designed to prevent certain content with more mature or complex themes from reaching younger audiences. When we detect content that contains overtly mature or complex themes, a content level is allocated to the post to help prevent those under 18 years old from viewing it across the TikTok experience.

Empowering our Community

We’re invested in supporting our community's well-being and empowering families and young people to manage their own experience.

Family Pairing

Family Pairing is designed to empower parents, guardians, and young people to customize their safety and content settings based on individual needs. It is part of our continued work toward providing parents and guardians with a better ability to guide their teen's online experience and to educate them about online safety and digital citizenship.

Family Pairing lets parents and guardians link their TikTok account to their teen's account to enable a variety of content and privacy settings, including:

• Account privacy: Parents and guardians can set their teen’s account to private or public.
• Restricted Mode: Parents and guardians can limit their teen’s exposure to content that may not be suitable for them.
• Comments: Parents and guardians can restrict who can comment on their teen’s videos.
• Direct messages: Parents and guardians can restrict who, if anyone, can send private messages to their teen’s account if their teen is 16 years old or over.
• Screen time management: Parents and guardians can choose the amount of time their teens can be on TikTok each day, and get insights into their time spent through a screen time dashboard.
• Search settings: Parents and guardians can choose to restrict their teen’s ability to search for content.
• Push notifications: In addition to our restrictions on push notifications for teens at night, parents and guardians can restrict push notifications to their teens during other specific times.
• Keyword filters: Parents and guardians can add hashtags or keywords they would prefer their teen not see in their For You feed recommendations.
• Suggest account: Parents and guardians can disable this setting to block their linked teen's accounts from being suggested to others on the platform.
• Liked content: Parents and guardians can select who can view the content their teens liked on TikTok.
• STEM feed: Parents and guardians in a growing number of countries can ensure that the TikTok feed featuring videos related to science, technology, engineering, and math is enabled.

We encourage caregivers to discuss the Family Pairing features with their teens and explain why they choose to turn them on. Even without Family Pairing enabled, parents and guardians can help their teens enable our app’s screen time offerings, including Daily Screen Time and Restricted Mode settings.

Learn more about Family Pairing on TikTok.

Screen time

For everyone, regardless of age, we offer screen time management tools including:

• Screen time limit: Helps people decide how much time they’d like to spend on TikTok each day, with the option of having customizable limits depending on the day of the week.
• Scheduled screen time breaks: Helps remind people to take a break from TikTok after a period of uninterrupted screen time.
• Screen time dashboard: Gives people insight into how much time they're spending on TikTok.
• Weekly notifications: People can opt for weekly notifications to recap their screen time.
• Sleep reminder: People can set a sleep reminder for themselves, which, when reached, will remind them that it’s time to log off.
• Mute push notifications: People can schedule specific periods of time where push notifications are muted on their device.
• Screen time content: Content on TikTok encourages people to take a break from their phones and enjoy the world offline.

Learn more about screen time on TikTok.

Recommendations safety

The goal of the For You feed is to provide original content that honors our mission of inspiring creativity and bringing joy. Our recommendation system is designed with user safety as a primary consideration, meaning that some content is not eligible for recommendation.

We continually invest in tools that help people create the best TikTok experience for them. We offer a feature that lets people refresh their For You feed if their recommendations no longer feel relevant. If someone refreshes their feed, our recommendation system will then begin to surface more content based on new interactions.

People can also choose to automatically filter out content that uses specific hashtags or phrases from their For You feeds, select “Not interested” to skip future content from a particular creator, or content that uses a particular sound.

Learn more about how TikTok recommends content.

Resources for teens

TikTok has an abundance of resources to support young people on TikTok. Many of these can be found in our Safety Center, including the dedicated Well-being guide and Teen Safety Center guide, Help Center, and Privacy Center. We also aim to provide parents and guardians with resources they can use to have conversations with their family about digital safety and decide the most appropriate experience for them, such as the Guardian’s Guide, and Family Pairing features.

Age Assurance

As stated, you must be at least 13 years old to have an account on TikTok. Our neutral, industry-standard age gate requires people to fill in their complete date of birth without any pre-populated minimum age. TikTok has a 12+ rating in the App Store (Apple) and is listed as Parental Guidance Recommended in Google’s Play Store. These ratings mean parents can use device-level controls to block their child from downloading the app.

In the US, if someone enters a birthday that confirms they are under 13 years old, they will be directed to a curated viewing experience with additional safeguards and privacy protections designed specifically for this audience.

Age assurance, which encompasses a range of methods for estimating or verifying age, continues to be one of the most complex policy areas that online platforms, policymakers and regulators grapple with. To advance industry-wide discussions, we launched a global Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue with WeProtect Global Alliance and the Centre for Information Policy Leadership, along with industry peers. This project brings together online platforms, regulators, policymakers, privacy and child rights organizations to discuss industry-wide approaches to age assurance that help make the online world safer for young people while also respecting their fundamental rights.

Removing suspected underage accounts

While most people understand the importance of being truthful about their age, some do not provide the correct information, which is a challenge many online services face. This is one reason why our commitment to enforcing our minimum age requirements does not end at the age gate and we take a number of additional approaches to identify and remove suspected underage account holders. We use information, such as keywords and in-app reports from our community, to help detect potential underage accounts. Our safety team is also trained to identify accounts that may belong to an underage person. If we believe an account belongs to a person under the age of 13, we remove it and people are provided with an opportunity to appeal if they believe we have made a mistake. Also, if we determine that an account with a different stated age, in fact, belongs to a young person under 18, we will tag the account so that it will benefit from additional age-appropriate safeguards. Information regarding removals of suspected underage accounts is shared as part of our quarterly transparency reporting.

Combating child sexual exploitation and abuse

TikTok does not tolerate child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), which includes child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming, pedophilia, sextortion, sexual solicitation, and sexual harassment of young people under the age of 18. This includes content that is AI-generated. When we become aware of suspected CSEA, whether through our own proactive detection methods, community reporting, or industry partnerships, we take immediate action to remove it, permanently ban accounts, and submit reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US-based nonprofit that refers cases to law enforcement globally. TikTok publishes bi-annual reports on the number of CSEA reports we make to NCMEC through their dedicated CyberTipline.

For more information on our comprehensive approach and extensive partnerships, please see Combating child sexual exploitation and abuse.