TikTok

Happy New Year! One of my New Year’s resolutions is to make these eSafety blogs more digestible / accessible.  i.e. Short and to the point.

It does mean that I will need to post slightly more frequently but that is the trade-off.

TikTok 

One of the biggest tech trends for kids in 2019 was the rise of TikTok, a social media app that Common Sense Media have described as “what you’d get if you put YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram in a blender—and just kept it running ’til your brain exploded.” This year millions of kids flooded onto the app, and parents were at a loss, wondering what their kids were doing (or being exposed to) on this new platform.

TikTok is a video-sharing social media app available on iOS and Android which lets users create, share, and view user created videos. It’s main draw, however, is that users can record and upload bite-sized looping videos of themselves lip-syncing and dancing to popular music or soundbites, often for comedic effect.  These videos can then be further enhanced with filters, emojis and stickers. TikTok (previously music.ly) has been designed with the young user in mind and has a very addictive appeal. At the beginning of 2019 it was the iOS store’s most downloaded app.

Some useful advice can be found here from National Online Safety, but our advice remains the same as for all social media apps; please discuss your child’s usage of the app with them and check their posts and activities by reviewing their phones frequently.

https://nationalonlinesafety.com/resources/wake-up-wednesday/tiktok-guide/