TikTok is planning to ban teen users in Europe from using beauty filters that alter their facial features. In the coming weeks, minors will be blocked from making their eyes bigger, plumping their lips, and smoothing or changing their skin tone with filters—all part of an effort to mitigate the impact on teens’ mental health.
The social media giant announced in a press release on Monday that restrictions won’t apply to filters that are “designed to be obvious and funny,” such as adding animal ears or comically exaggerating certain features. However, the same can’t be said for beautifying effects like Bold Glamour, which have been criticized for perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards. The new rollouts, announced during a safety forum at the social-media company’s European headquarters in Dublin, also include expanding filter descriptions to specify what the filters adjust when applied.
The changes are in response to a report, supported by TikTok from the children’s online safety nonprofit Internet Matters, which found that “beautifying filters contributed to a distorted worldview in which perfected images are normalized.” Children often couldn’t tell the difference between an altered image and an unaltered one, with today’s hyperrealistic filters changing faces pixel by pixel rather than traditional beauty filters, which overlaid a face mesh on a 2D screen. The report found teens faced “significant social pressure” to appear a certain way online, with filters found to have a disastrous effect on self-esteem and increase risk of mental health issues.
TikTok has over one billion monthly active users globally, with 150 million in the United States. According to Business Insider, children between the ages of 11 and 17 spend close to two hours per day on TikTok, making it their most used social media platform.
TikTok currently allows anyone over the age of 13 to become a registered user, as per its own terms of service, with those categorized as between 13 and 18 having different settings and defaults in place. But while the company tries to enforce these age restrictions through various mechanisms, the effectiveness of the restrictions often depends on people using the platform under their real age, which is not always the case. TikTok also announced it was tightening its systems to block users under 13 from the platform, launching a trial before the end of the year to detect people cheating its age restrictions.
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