TikTok is starting to offer users a new level of control over their For You page. The company announced today that you can specify specific words or hashtags that you don’t want to see on your channels, and the app will filter them automatically. TikTok examples are pretty simple, like when you’ve finished a reindeer and don’t want to watch any more DIY videos or decide you don’t want to watch cooking tutorials with a certain type of food or meat. But these types of filters could be used to monitor your feed much more carefully.
The platform is also launching two new automated moderation and filtering tools. One, called content levels, classifies content based on “thematic maturity” and is designed to prevent adult content of all kinds from being displayed to young users. (TikTok compared it to the rating systems you’ll find in movies or video games.) The other tries to identify videos that are good one-on-one but are problematic in bulk: dietary fads, depression-related content, and the like. , and avoid showing them repeatedly to users. TikTok has been working on this for a while and is ready to launch it.
These types of automated tools are TikTok’s bread and butter, and the platform has primarily resisted offering users fine-grained tools to control the content they see (or don’t). Even the design of the app shows its priorities – you can swipe to the next source, of course, but the For You page is where TikTok’s remarkable algorithm will only tell you what you like. The more TikTok can be just an app that you open and slide, rather than one that does your homework, the better.
However, this is a tricky position, especially as younger users adopt the app and problematic content types become popular. Really, this is the same thing that all social apps struggle with: understanding how users actually interact and experience content, and how to measure success beyond simple views and tastes. And we don’t really know much about TikTok’s health impacts yet.
We still don’t get the “please introduce me to #gardeningtok” button and TikTok still has questions to answer about the content you choose to recommend, but it’s nice to see that TikTok gives users a little more control over their own channels . The app has had a “I don’t care” button for a long time, which you can use to stop watching videos of a certain user or those who use a certain sound. Adding hashtag filters is an obvious step and is similar to what some other social platforms have done.
Currently, word-based filters only look at video descriptions and text-based stickers. But in the future, in theory they could be much more powerful: subtitles are a key part of TikTok and their automatic subtitles are usually pretty good, which means the platform could start to understand more deeply the content of their videos only with its transcripts. For now, you may only be able to filter individual words, but as machine learning and language models continue to improve, this feature could quickly become more sophisticated. This same work will also benefit the rest of TikTok’s moderation work. The more you understand both your content and your viewers, the better you will be able to tailor the experience. Neither is easy to figure out, though.
TikTok’s new features will be rolled out “in the coming weeks,” the company said.