what does a 14 year old see on tiktok? is it something like this
or this?
lately i've been seeing a lot of stories in the news about the dangers of what young people are
seeing on tiktok things like how business insider found out it took only eight minutes of scrolling
on tiktok for a 14 year old to see videos about plastic surgery and a 10 year old died after
participating in a trend she saw in tiktok. tiktok also recently changed creator capabilities for 13
to 15 year old accounts which is probably why things like how to change age on tiktok
are now trending on google trends based on these stories it sounded like younger people were seeing
some pretty crazy stuff on the app it also gave me an impression that tiktok wasn't doing a great job
of serving age-appropriate content to them so i decided to see for myself i went undercover as a
14 year old named purple ice cream 8 to discover what a 14 year old sees on tiktok i headed to the
for you page then watch the first 100 videos that came up and recorded different aspects
about the content the qualities i noted about each video were things like what topics were the
videos on was their swearing in the video what tiktok features were used were there effects or
was it a stitch or a duet video and i also noted down how many and what type of ads i was seeing
i also used the movie classification system from the motion picture association
to give each video a maturity rating which is a spectrum that starts with g
and goes all the way to nc 17 and gives advice as to who should be watching that content
according to the inclusion of things like violence sexual activity drug abuse and swearing purple ice
cream mate had no history of likes or comments on any videos and i didn't like or comment on
any videos so as not to influence what the algorithm showed me during the process i
realized we needed something to compare against so i also created an 18 year old account named
older ice cream 8 and repeated the same steps by looking at the first 100 videos on the fyp
and after watching 100 videos as the 14 year old purpleicecream8 and the 18 year
old oldericecream8 i found that there were some significant differences in the viewing experience
in terms of the subject matter in the videos shown and the tiktok features that were used
in the videos surprisingly though there were few differences in the ads experience let's start with
subject matter it seemed that tiktok was filtering content to some degree as the 18 year old saw much
more mature content than 14 year old the ratings for the 14 year old were mostly pg 13 and under
while the 18 year old saw a lot more r rated videos mostly due to the videos mentioning sexual
or violent activity and the use of the f word that being said swearing was also more frequent and
harsher in the 18 year old videos because while the 14 year old saw a couple uses of the f word
swearing was mostly limited to the expletives that start with s and b whereas the 18 year old saw
many more uses of the f word in addition to these other ones the topics of the videos also differed
noticeably content seen on the younger purple ice cream aid account was mostly comedy and or
commentary on family relationships such as skits where a parent imitates what their kids are like
on the other hand the 18 year old content was a lot more distributed across a couple topics with
significantly more speaking based videos such as story times or advice this made me wonder could
it be that humorous content is just what 14 year olds prefer as opposed to speaking based videos
or is tick tock intentionally serving mostly comedy and family content because they passed some
safety screening tests i also found that almost all the r-rated videos on both accounts were
dark humor where the creators joked about serious topics like murder and abuse for example as per
the motion picture association rating guidelines we gave an r rating to the following video which
showed up in the 14 year old account mostly due to its use of the f word in sexual context
dad you might want to come in here this guy just told me to take my shirt off i told him
i'm 11 years old you're not about to me i'm getting my dad he's your doctor derek okay
okay so he just put his hand up my shirt told me to take a deep breath i know he's about
me now can you come in here and tell him that i'm not down eric he's your doctor get in there okay
he just put his hand down my pants it's a physical um what's wrong with you
hey okay so you're right he is a doctor everything turns out to be fine in the end
but it jokes about what can be a serious topic this brings up another age-old question
where should creators and tick-tock itself draw the line with dark humor and if something is said
in a funny context does that make it more okay on a separate but related note the 14 year old
account was also shown this video who's the man you're the man strong healthy black man
while this particular video isn't the worst thing in the world it does bring up another question
how can a safety algorithm catch videos where nothing super questionable is verbally spoken
or visibly shown but holds an implied message specific to the context that you might not want
younger people to see in addition to subject matter there is also a difference in what tiktok
features were used in the videos shown to the 14 year old versus the 18 year old tiktok might
be trying to hook younger viewers with videos that are more shiny by serving content that
uses music and the effects or filters that are unique to tiktok there is some type of music in
22 of the videos shown to the 14 year old account versus only 16 shown to the 18 year old similarly
effects were used in nine of the videos shown to the 14 year old versus only two to the 18 year old
and the effects used were mostly the green screen filters which are commonly used in the comedy skit
videos the highest category of content by far that was seen by the 14 year old account this brings up
the question again are younger people just more interested in this content and thus make it go
viral or is tiktok intentionally advertising their own effects in an attempt to grab younger users
attention away from every other app competing for eyeballs on the flip side tiktok might also
be trying to hide certain features from younger users as the 14 year old account saw fewer stitch
videos than the 18 year old account stitch is a tiktok feature that was launched a few months ago
where a user can use part of another user's video in their own and recently tick tock has added
enhanced privacy on this feature for 13 to 15 year olds while younger users can still make stitches
no one can make a stitch from their video showing a 14 year old fewer stitch videos would probably
reduce their awareness and use of the feature overall though which makes me wonder if that was
tick-tock's motivation behind this interestingly there are almost no duets shown at all for both
accounts this could be because duets don't get as popular easily and thus don't get promoted by the
algorithm since they're usually on niche topics that only a tiktoker's fans would be interested in
now advertising to teens is a historically controversial topic that even tiktok is not immune
to as it's been accused of hidden advertising however the ad experience for the 14 year old
and 18 year old were surprisingly pretty similar and not very noteworthy out of 100 videos that we
saw on each accounts for you page a similar number of them were ads and they also advertised similar
products almost all the ads were promoting mobile apps such as phone wallpaper makers or
new sites this could be chalked up to the fact that like most social media platforms tick tock
uses your engagement history to personalize the ads you see but since both accounts had
no history of likes or comments and no evidence of what content they actually like to see tiktok only
had the fact that they had a phone to go off of and so served ads relevant to a phone user
with this experiment we set out to discover what a 14 year old sees on tiktok and whether
the content they saw was age-appropriate for the most part it seems like it was the 14 year old and
18 year old account saw pretty different content on their for you pages where the 14 year old saw
content with less swearing mentions of violence or sexual activity and content generally centered
around comedy and family relationships the 14 year old also saw videos that had more tiktok
features like effects and music but they saw fewer stitched videos and for me the ultimate
question that this all boils down to is how much of these differences are due to tiktok adjusting
and filtering the algorithm intentionally from the top versus users of different ages just
engaging more in liking different content and thus making that type of content more viral and be more
likely to end up on the for you page and while it does look like tiktok did a mostly good job
with serving age-appropriate content from our experiment we did only look at 100 videos for
each age how does this hold up over the hours days weeks months that people are consuming
content on their platform tiktok is also an extremely influential platform that has sped
up the process of virality it seems like a new trend is going viral every week so in the grand
scheme of things while it's easy to discount the impact of just a single minute long video
it still remains a fact that one video can do a lot of damage what people see on tiktok matters
and tiktok needs to do their part to ensure that headlines like this never happen again
thanks for watching this video make sure to subscribe to our channel to
learn more about tiktok and modern creators and if you have any questions or other
experiments you want us to do let us know in the comments below we'll see you in the next one