TikTok is an ever growing craze for young children. It has an advisory age of 13 and over because of the content which is shared and the easy ability to connect with other users. Much of the content is of an adult nature and without supervision your child could see many videos which are not age appropriate and connect with strangers.
During discussions with our older children recently about social media we were concerned to hear a misconception on how accounts must be open so that parents could keep close control over their children’s accounts. This is not true. Your account does not need to be open for a parent to check, we do not advise any of our pupils to have accounts but if you have given permission to your child to use it then we strongly advise that they have a closed account. As a parent, you should have a password that you share with your child at all times so that you can access their account 24/7. This is the safest way to monitor their account for threats. This advice we give to both the use of instagram (13+) and whatsapp (16+).
There have been a number of safety alerts both in the media and from advisory sectors of computing education that should be listened to. This is a social media targeted at older teenagers and adults.
Parental Controls: You can now set parental controls on TikTok so you have more say on what content children are seeing in their stream. Follow this link for more details. (As always, these settings do not always block everything, parent supervision is still required!)
Below is a link to information from the National Online Safety, which as a school, we encourage you to follow.
Taken from NationalOnlineSafety.com
TikTok is a video-sharing social media app available on iOS and Android which lets users create, share, and view user created videos much in a similar manner to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. It’s main draw, however, is that users can record and upload bite-sized looping videos of themselves lip-syncing and dancing to popular music or soundbites, often for comedic effect, which can then be further enhanced with filters, emojis and stickers. TikTok has been designed with the young user in mind and has a very addictive appeal. At the beginning of 2019 it skyrocketed in popularity to become the iOS store’s most downloaded app with over 33 million downloads. Estimates suggest that it now has anything between 500 million and over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide.
