TikTok is beginning to give users more control over their For You page. The company announced today that you will be able to specify specific words or hashtags that you do not want to see in your feeds, and the app will filter them out automatically. TikTok’s examples are fairly simple, such as when you’ve completed a renovation and no longer want to see DIY videos, or when you decide you don’t want to see cooking tutorials using a specific type of food or meat. However, these filters could be used to much more precisely control your feed.
In addition, the platform is introducing two new automated moderation and filtering tools. One, known as Content Levels, ranks content based on “thematic maturity” and is intended to prevent mature content of all kinds from being shown to young users. (TikTok likened it to the rating systems found in movies and video games.) The other tries to identify videos that are fine one at a time but problematic in large quantities — dieting fads, depression-related content, and so on — and avoid showing them to users repeatedly. TikTok has been working on this for some time and is now ready to launch it.
