The past year hasn’t been easy on anyone. Whether directly or not, the pandemic has taken a big toll on our collective mental health. And TikTok is taking it seriously. The social media platform just launched a new feature: filters to promote kindness.
Following recent similar initiatives by Twitter and Instagram, Tiktok is aiming to fight bullying, harassment and triggering content on their platform, and to help users be nicer to each other.
The first of these tools is a feature that allows TikTokers to control who can comment on their posts. The “filter all comments” feature, when enabled, will allow users to essentially moderate their video’s comments section, only allowing comments to show up once they are approved by the creator.
The filter feature might be a tedious task to perform when there are thousands of comments under a viral video, or for content creators with a large number of followers, but the company promised to keep improving the feature in terms of practicality. “We know that comments are an important way for community members to connect with creators, and we’ll continue to develop ways to promote respectful discussion,” the company said on its blog.
The second feature is a new prompt, which, when rolled out will ask people to “reconsider posting a comment which may be inappropriate or unkind”, or those which violate TikTok’s existing Community Guidelines. Not only does this discourage users from posting a negative comment, it also holds them accountable for the harm that their words might cause.
The platform is going further in an attempt to eradicate bullying and harassment too, announcing a new partnership with the Cyberbulling Research Center (CRC) to advance the team’s knowledge of bullying, both on and offline.