Guardian's guide

TikTok is a short form video app. It is a place for fun and positive content created by real people around the world. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy.

The core part of the TikTok experience is the For You feed, which is powered by a recommendation system. This system brings together all the interactions someone has with TikTok, such as whether they 'like' a video, leave a comment, or watch a video to the end, and uses those to curate a personalized For You feed. No two For You feeds are the same, which is what makes TikTok so special - everyone can find content they love.

While the spontaneity of the For You feed is what makes TikTok unique, it is intended for a range of audiences that includes everyone from teenagers to great grandparents. It is for this reason that certain content categories are not eligible for recommendation. Through Content Levels, we also work to minimize content with overtly mature themes from reaching teens under 18.

You can read more about how the For You feed works here.

Getting started

You can download TikTok from application platforms such as the Apple App Store and Google Play. TikTok has a 12+ rating in the Apple App Store and is listed as “Parental Guidance Recommended” in Google Play. If you don’t want your teen to download TikTok, these ratings mean you can prevent them from doing so using the parental controls available through these stores or platforms.

To sign up for TikTok, new users must provide their date of birth. From restricting access to certain features to tailoring the ads people can see, accurate age information helps community members have the correct, age-appropriate, experience.

In the US, we offer a curated, view-only experience for those under age 13 that includes additional safeguards and privacy protections. We partner with Common Sense Networks to select content that it deems to be both age-appropriate and safe for an audience under 13.

TikTok's rules

Our Community Guidelines set the rules for TikTok and help us to create a welcoming, safe, and entertaining experience. These apply to everyone and everything on our platform. We have a dedicated Youth Safety and Well-Being section which explains the steps we take to help keep young people safe and the types of content we age-restrict.

We design the TikTok experience for teens under 18 to be different from the experience for adults. For example:

  1. All accounts for teens under 18 start out as private. Teens can choose to make their account public, and if you've linked your accounts, you can change this choice by using Family Pairing.
  2. A daily screen time limit is set to 60 minutes for all accounts for teens under 18 by default. You and your teens can further customize this limit to suit their needs when Family Pairing is enabled.
  3. Only accounts for those ages 18 or older can go LIVE.
  4. Accounts for teens under 16 don't have access to direct messaging or group chat (where available).
  5. We don't allow content posted by accounts for teens under 16 to be recommended in the For You feed of people they don't know.