Empowering families and ensuring online safety will enable teens to thrive on TikTok

At TikTok, we believe that creative and joyful experiences on our app start with feeling safe. Teen accounts on TikTok have robust protections by default with over 50 safety features and settings designed just for them so they can safely express their creativity and connect with friends.

We understand that keeping pace with fast-moving digital platforms can be complex. In a survey of 1,000 UK parents of teenagers, three in five (61%) told us they feel better equipped than five years ago to talk about online safety — but nearly half (46%) still feel out of touch.

That’s why we’re building even more tools to support families, alongside our core work to keep the community safe.

We introduced our Family Pairing feature over five years ago with the aim of giving parents and caregivers greater support and oversight of their teens' experience. Today, we're starting to introduce even more features to Family Pairing, meaning parents can now customise or view more than 20 content, privacy and well-being settings for their teens.

Whether it's blocking them from following specific accounts, viewing how their teen has shaped their For You feed with our Manage Topics feature, or receiving alerts when they post a video publicly, these updates are all designed to help families shape digital habits that work for them and support conversations about online safety.

These changes reflect what families tell us they need: support, transparency, and flexibility. To help us build effective tools, we also hear directly from teens-including through our global Youth Council, a group of 28 teens from 15 countries, including two from the UK, who help us design solutions for a positive experience.

While teens crave independence online, they also want guidance. Family Pairing provides parents with a jumping off point to talk with their teens about how they use TikTok. Combined with our Digital Safety Partnership for Families, we continue to equip families with a toolkit to have open and ongoing conversations about their experiences online.

No two teenagers are the same, and no two parenting styles are either. We’ve spoken to experts and academics to make sure our features aren’t just technically effective, but practically helpful for real families.

To further support parents over the Summer holidays, we have launched a new initiative called #SummerSkills, designed to make it even easier for teens to learn, connect and get creative.

From football tricks to songwriting, poetry to science experiments, TikTok creators will bring these skills to life each week throughout the summer.

We’ll never stop listening, learning, and building with safety at the heart of our platform. This year alone we will invest £1.5bn in doing just that. These new tools are another step forward in helping families feel confident about how their teens use TikTok.

Because empowering families, alongside our critical work on safety, will enable teens to thrive online.

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Ali Law is the Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs for UK and Ireland at TikTok

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