All the dangers behind using Tik Tok
In just a few years, Tik Tok was able to conquer every single strip of land, starting from China. It is the first Chinese social network to succeed in such an undertaking, putting competitors like Facebook and Instagram in serious difficulty, who had to run for cover. This app that allows the sharing of videos of all kinds, has become increasingly popular especially after the sad advent of the Coronavirus epidemic, which has forced and isolated millions of children at home, depriving them of the sociability and playful activities that marked them. free time in the real world. Young people, therefore, but also children unfortunately, have taken refuge on social networks, TikTok in the first place, but more than a refuge, these platforms often turn into real traps, hiding pitfalls and dangers. This is why we want to clarify this very controversial app and often at the center of the public debate, highlighting the dangers that one can run and the solutions with which to protect one's privacy and, above all, that of the little ones.
Watch this video and discover all the funniest and most creative exercises with which to entertain your children!
How TikTok works
TikTok, known in China as Douyin, is a Chinese social network, which was officially born in September 2016 under the name of Musical.ly. To find out how the platform works, just browse it for a few seconds, even without accessing it. In fact, it is not necessary to open an account to be able to take advantage of all the content available on this site. Basically, TikTok is a social company born with recreational intentions with which to entertain users, allowing them to record and share clips with a duration between 15 and 60 seconds on which it is possible to add filters, effects, songs and dubbed voices.
It is the first Chinese platform to have obtained such a great response all over the world so that in India, before the latest restrictions, subscriptions on TikTok had far exceeded those on Instagram. To date, the Chinese social network has a well-established community of around 750 million users, having experienced astounding growth in recent years that has not gone unnoticed even in the eyes of Mark Zuckerberg. Frightened by these numbers, the founder and CEO of Facebook Inc. has introduced some innovations and improvements to its apps, see the "reels" feature on Instagram, just to prove itself up to the Chinese competition.
Com "was born Tik Tok
Tik Tok was founded in China in 2015 by startuppers Alex Zhu and Lulu Yang. Two years later, more precisely in November 2017, the Chinese company ByteDance acquires musical.ly, offering the founders and owners a figure equal to 750 million euros. The decisive turning point for the Chinese social network arrives on 2 August 2018, when ByteDance decides to merge Tik Tok and musical.ly, under the single and definitive name of TikTok, in order to expand its catchment area. users of the platform is, in fact, tiktokers.
Tik tok and security: a problem of privacy and censorship
Despite its popularity, Tik Tok's reputation is not the best, especially when it comes to content moderation, data management and user privacy protection. Following some incidents of censorship, applied in particular to videos that dealt with important episodes in Chinese history such as the events in Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence and the most recent uprisings in Hong Kong, suspicion has crept more and more forcefully that the Chinese government is responsible for moderating the contents, obscuring the most "sensitive" posts from the social platform at will. Furthermore, since the administration of the data is also unclear, especially after some complaints about the invasion of privacy by the application, it is feared once again that the government of China may have free access to the personal data of the users to be able to manipulate and exploit them in their favor in case of need.
Is tik tok dangerous?
Although it may seem like an innocent and fun app, designed for the one and only purpose of entertaining users, behind TikTok there are gray areas, more or less serious risks and dangers for those who use it, especially for the younger ones. It should be considered, in fact, that 30% of users have not even reached the age of 18 and, despite the minimum age to register is 13, there are currently no effective control mechanisms capable of verifying with certainty the veracity of the data. who accesses it. Therefore it is feared, and it is a rather well-founded fear, that even younger children and, at least on paper, unauthorized will have free access. However, it is undeniable that, due to its way of use, the main Chinese social network is particularly attractive and intuitive for the younger sections of society, attracting especially young people and children from all over the world. To better understand the phenomenon, just think that the main influencers on the platform are rarely older than 19 and that the first person to reach 100 million followers on Tik Tok was Charlie D'Amelio, a girl from Connecticut. just 16 years old.
Precisely by virtue of the young age of the members, stricter security measures and more careful monitoring are urgently needed to ensure respect for privacy and the protection of users. To date, unfortunately, these precautions have not yet been taken and that is why, for many parents and specialists, Tik Tok is still a disreputable application. The Indian government, followed by that of Bangladesh and Indonesia, has arrived to the point of banning the app from Google and Play Store because of its contents, found guilty of inciting pornography and pedophilia. The accusation of these countries actually finds a grain of truth if we consider that most of the videos shared on TikTok are also accessible to those who are not registered, so everything that is uploaded to the social network by users, and among these we also include children, can be used by anyone, including criminals.
What are the dangers of Tik Tok for children and teens
But let's see in more detail what are the dangers that children and adolescents actually run on a platform like Tik Tok. Among the worst pitfalls we find the challenges. These are dangerous challenges, launched and made viral by Tik Tok, in which the person who joins them is called to act in an extreme way, all recorded by a video, not so much to challenge their limits, but more to get likes, consents and followers. Among the most dangerous we can include the Blackout Challenge, according to which users should have self-procured temporary asphyxiation or the Bright Eye Challenge, in which the individual was challenged to wet the eye with a mixture of bleach, hand sanitizer. and shaving foam so as to temporarily alter the color of the iris, both gestures that can cause even lethal damage. Often these are real incitements to suicide or murder whose risks, albeit objectively high, are absolutely underestimated by children and young people, still too young and immature to recognize the danger and avoid it. Furthermore, a social network like TikTok, in which a potential fame is within everyone's reach, can be destabilizing for the psyche of the little ones, unable to manage a popularity of this magnitude. Without considering dangers such as depression and addiction, two conditions often linked to the use of apps and social media, and exposure to a drama like that of cyberbullying, for which more and more users over the years have suffered and only rarely reported reception of highly offensive messages and comments. Therefore, given the extent of all these risks, it is clear why adults, and not just parents, have great apprehension and skepticism about the use of the Internet in general and of Tik Tok in particular by their children, especially if they are age under 18.
Tik Tok dangers: a guide for parents
Given and considered all the potential dangers faced by children and adolescents on Tik Tok, it is evident why an active and careful vigilance on the part of parents is urgent. These, in fact, are called to supervise the use that their children make of their social networks, including Facebook and Instagram, and not so much through illicit smartphone spying techniques, but through a constructive dialogue, with which to make children aware of risks that can be incurred by making improper use of these means. Here are some useful tips for all parents who want to monitor and fight the use of Tik Tok by their children.
- Parental Controls: Maybe not everyone is aware of this, but on many devices it is possible to enable parental controls. Thanks to this setting, parents can prevent the installation of a certain app on their children's mobile phones.
- Private account: to prevent the content shared on TikTok by your children from being visible to everyone and thus protect their privacy, it is possible to skim the potential audience by setting the child's or young person's account in private mode. This way, the videos on his profile will only be visible to a limited number of authorized followers, preferably with parental supervision.
- Content management: at the time of registration, mom and dad can access the platform through their child's profile, indicating potentially dangerous content with the "I don't care" option. By doing so, the child will no longer be shown similar videos.
- Time control: through the "application control" feature, parents can limit the use of Tik Tok so that their children do not waste too much time on the platform. Once the allowed period has been exceeded, it will be necessary to enter a code that only mum and dad have.
- Last but not least, the most effective strategy to remove children from the virtual world: to offer them valid alternatives with which to spend time constructively and get back in touch with reality.
