After the United Kingdom has announced that social media platforms that do not create ways to tackle disturbing content related to suicide, depression, and self-harm will be faced with multi-million fines, popular short-video platform TikTok has announced an upcoming set of new community guidelines and tools, including a warning screen for possible sensitive content.
TikTok's Warning Screens
According to a report by The Verge, the graphic content warning screen will appear if a TikTok contains content that others might find disturbing, triggering, or sensitive.
This helps users avoid viewing these contents by accident.
There are two choices for when these warning screens finally make it into the popular app: either users can check out the video themselves, or they can skip it entirely.
The types of contents that will get the warning labels will be videos for "documentary reasons," violent scenes of animal hunting, as well as scenes from horror movies, contents that are already not allowed on the app's For You feed.
Contents that are deemed too disturbing and sensitive will be removed completely from the site.
New Community Guidelines and Tools
Moreover, TikTok will also include a new text-to-voice accessibility feature, which would read out the texts that appear in a video.
The platform is also adding help resources for anyone who will be searching for terms such as "hatemyself" or "selfharm," including links to organizations such as Crisis Textline and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, among others.
Furthermore, as the COVID-19 vaccines are finally rolling out in the United States, the website is also adding more details to its coronavirus hub that could be accessible through the Discover page and search results.
The hub will also be added on the banners of videos related to the disease.
According to the report, the TikTok coronavirus hub will include new information about the COVID-19 vaccine, such as answers to frequently asked questions and further details about the vaccine from experts from the Centers for Disease Control.
Based on the company's data, the hub has been viewed over 2 billion times in the last six months.
After the Initial Release of Epilepsy Warnings
All of these new guidelines and features are added a few weeks after the release of epilepsy warnings on the site, which are added to photosensitive videos to avoid people who are sensitive to it and cause seizures.
TechCrunch recently reported that TikTok users have the option to skip all photosensitive videos through the "Skip All" option.
The company consulted several organizations such as the Epilepsy Foundation before they proceeded to add the nice new feature.
It's rather unclear whether TikTok is adding the warning screen as a response to the UK's threats of possibly banning websites that do not delete sensitive content, but it's about time that social media platforms take these matters seriously.
In a recent post by Tech Times, the government of the United Kingdom decided to consider the multi-million-pound punishment and possible banning to further protect their people from self-harm and suicide, especially after a young teenager took her own life in 2017 after seeing posts about depression via Instagram.
Related Article: UK Threatens to Ban Social Media Networks Due to Harmful Content With Criminal Charges
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by: Nhx Tingson
