TikTok made an official announcement today that they claim will enhance the community experience, bringing in a variety of new features, updates, and policies that they say will continue their mission to drive “entertaining content and building connections”
According to the official announcement, here are breakdowns of each new feature:
Multi-Guest: To make way for more meaningful connections with audiences, we’ve recently upgraded our Multi-Guest feature. Through Multi-Guest, hosts can now go LIVE with up to 5 guests using a grid or panel layout, keeping audiences engaged as they respond to questions, host how-to videos, or simply share a moment together with the community.
Community Safety: The foundation of TikTok is built on community trust and safety. To protect our users and creators and support their well-being, we constantly work to evolve the safeguards we put in place. Today, we’re making additional changes and improvements to help our community have the best experience possible when they use LIVE.
Currently, people must be aged 16 or over to host a LIVE. From November 23, the minimum age will increase from 16 to 18. As we consider the breadth of our global audience, we already take a graduated approach to the features that our community can access based on their age; younger teens need to be aged 16 or older to access Direct Messaging and 18 or older to send virtual gifts or access monetization features.
In addition, in the coming weeks, we plan to introduce a new way for creators to choose if they’d prefer to only reach an adult audience in their LIVE. For instance, perhaps a comedy routine is better suited for people over age 18. Or, a host may plan to talk about a difficult life experience and they would feel more comfortable knowing the conversation is limited to adults. We want our community to make the most of the opportunities LIVE can bring without compromising on safety. We believe these industry-leading updates can further protect the younger members of our community as they start and build their online presence.
Additionally: To help creators focus on entertaining and engaging their viewers, LIVE creators can already use our keyword filtering tool to limit comments they feel aren’t appropriate. In the coming weeks, we’re rolling out an updated version of this feature that will send a reminder to people and suggest new keywords they may want to consider adding to their filter list. To do this, the tool looks at the content a creator most commonly removes from their LIVE, spotting similar words in these comments and then suggesting the host may want to add these words to their filter list. When we tested this feature, we found that it nearly doubled those using keyword filtering when looking at the most popular LIVE creators.
