advertisement
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit

TikTok takes a methodical approach to dealing with dangerous challenges

While TikTok can be a lot of fun what with the comedy skits, showcasing of talent and general tom-foolery, there is a side to that app that raises concern from time to time.

We’re talking about challenges and more specifically challenges that would put those who participate in danger such as the Milk Crate Challenge.

Rather than banning challenges outright, which would likely have a negative impact on user numbers, TikTok’s head of safety public policy in Europe Alexandra Evans, explains how the firm launched a project to better understand how young people engage with potentially harmful challenges.

To that end the firm commissioned a survey of 10 000 teenagers, parents and teachers from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, Mexico, UK, US and Vietnam.

We do have to point out that it’s strange that the entire African continent was just ignored and not included in this survey.

Praesidio Safeguarding wrote a report on that survey and included key findings and recommendations.

So what was found?

For one, dangerous challenges aren’t a well kept secret and teens, parents and teachers are all mostly aware of dangerous challenges. This is helped along by the fact that mainstream or traditional media covers these challenges, but it also means that youngsters are going to come across a dangerous challenge at some point.

What we find incredibly interesting is how teens determine how dangerous a challenge is.

“The most common methods used by teens to assess risk were to watch videos of people trying it, view comments and speak to friends about it. The statistics show that while most challenges encountered are not perceived to be harmful – a minority
of them are identified as dangerous,” reads the report.

Furthermore, teens say they would appreciate help when evaluating risks with 46 percent of respondents says having more information on what it means to go too far would prevent them from trying something potentially dangerous.

It gets even more interesting though. Despite how prolific challenges on social media are, only 21 percent of teens in the survey said they had participated in a challenge of any kind. Furthermore, only two percent of teens surveyed had taken part in challenge considered risky and 0.3 percent took part in a challenge considered “really dangerous”.

The Blue Whale

All the way back in 2017 there was talk of something called The Blue Whale Challenge. This hoax claimed to encourage young children to participate in a series of challenges that culminated in suicide.

We say it was a hoax because to this day we have no encountered an instance where The Blue Whale Challenge was found to be real, but the panic it caused was all too real.

These sorts of hoaxes continue to be spread online and TikTok wants to combat this.

“Hoaxes like these often have similar characteristics, and in previous cases, false warnings have circulated suggesting that children were being encouraged to take part in ‘games’ which resulted in self-harm. Once planted, these hoaxes largely spread through warning messages encouraging others to alert as many people as possible to avoid perceived negative consequences. While the forward sharing of such warnings might seem harmless, the research found that 31 percent of teens exposed to these hoaxes had experienced a negative impact. Of those, 63 percent said the negative impact was on their mental health due to the nature of the content,” writes Evans.

To combat the spread of hoaxes and harmful challenges, TikTok will implement a prompt that will appear when somebody searches for this content encouraging them to visit the Safety Centre and learn more. Hoaxes linked to suicide and self-harm will have additional resources provided in the search results.

“We hope the work we’ve undertaken with these world-leading experts can help make a thoughtful contribution to this topic that others can draw insights and opportunities from as well. For our part, we know the action’s we’re taking now are just some of the important work that needs to be done across our industry, and we will continue to explore and implement additional measures on behalf of our community,” Evans concluded.

advertisement

About Author

advertisement

Related News

Subscribe to
our newsletters

[mailpoet_form id=”1″]