THE HAIRBRUSH FOR GENERATION Z

BY SIMON HARDING

Whatever your era, it’s almost a certainty that you picked up a hairbrush one day, cranked up the music and pretended you were the front man – or woman – of your favourite band. You probably had the moves too!

It’s something that’s brought us an immense amount of pleasure and some great big-screen moments too; think Muriel’s Wedding and Wayne’s World. Think Tom Cruise in Risky Business. And let’s not forget Hugh Grant’s almost cringe-worthy shuffle through a supposedly sleeping 10 Downing Street in Love Actually. It’s all – well, fun.

And that’s what today’s teens see in TikTok, an app for creating and watching short-form mobile videos. Sure, it’s far more public than anything most of us ever did with a hairbrush, but it’s highly engaging and allows them to just enjoy being creative.

Lots of people, mostly kids, produce videos of themselves miming to songs, performing comedy skits or taking up challenges, and post them online. Typically, these videos are up to 15 seconds long, though they can be merged to make them longer. The app has a database of songs, effects and soundbites, with which users can make their content look almost professional.

TikTok is, without question, a very engaging app, and your children will have a great deal of fun using it, should you choose to let them. If you do, then Common Sense Media has some advice: £ If your children are going to sign up, get them to use their real birth date – TikTok has a version of the site specifically for U13’s which offers similar functionality, without the ability to share videos publicly.

£ Make the account private. Accounts are public by default. £ Limit comments – either restrict who can comment or block comments completely. This will go some way towards protecting your child from online predators.

£ Limit time and inappropriate content – there are settings for both in TikTok, including specific words that you can block.

It originated as a lipsync app years ago, but was bought by a Chinese firm, ByteDance, in 2017 and rebranded as TikTok. It’s fast becoming THE way for people to find new genres of music and artists because ‘talentspotting’ is entirely crowd sourced. Unlike Spotify, which streams music and artists people already know, TikTok is fresher and more diverse.

TikTok’s official mission, however, is to capture and present the world’s creativity, knowledge and moments that matter in everyday life, and it describes itself as the world’s leading destination for short-form mobile videos. It is estimated to have between 500 million and 1 billion active users worldwide – far more than household names like Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn – and that number is growing. In the last twelve months, TikTok has consistently been the most downloaded app in the Apple Store.

It’s believed to be worth $75 billion and, therefore, the world’s most valuable start-up. In the West, TikTok was formerly known as musical.ly, before a 2017 merge. In China, a separate version of the site, Douyin, ensures that the platform complies with the country’s rigorous censorship laws.

TikTok uses artificial intelligence to develop a stream of content for each user that meets their previous search criteria – similar to the ‘up next’ column on YouTube. And you’ll find your children flicking through them one by one and, as usual, not wanting to come off.

So far so good. But like every other social media application, there’s a chance of being targeted by bullies. Important as that is, there are other concerns that are more specific to TikTok. It is a site used largely by children and is only for people over the age of 13, but that is obviously very difficult to police – it’s just as easy to enter a false date of birth on this platform as it is on other social media channels.

A recent BBC investigation found users as young as 9 years’ old on the site. Worse still, it found hundreds of sexually explicit comments, made by adults, on videos that had been posted by children of all ages. Although the comments were later removed by TikTok once it was made aware, many of those who posted them were able to remain on the platform.

Britain’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the NSPCC, has observed the same behaviour. Out of 40,000 children it researched, a quarter had livestreamed – not necessarily just on TikTok – with someone they had never met and an incredible one in 20 had been asked to take their clothes off.

The issues don’t end there. In February, 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission, which protects American consumers, made a complaint about TikTok – or musical. ly as it was at the time – illegally collecting personal information from children. The company agreed to a penalty of $5.7 million, the largest ever penalty obtained by the commission in a children’s privacy case. TikTok is also under investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK for its handling of young users’ private data.

Outside the US, for a brief period earlier this year the Indian Government ordered Google and Apple to ban TikTok from their stores in India, citing pornography and the safety of minors as the issue. The ban lasted only two weeks, but it was believed to have cost the company up to 15 million new users. In its defence, parent company, ByteDance took a similar approach to Facebook and Twitter, claiming that it couldn’t be held responsible for user-generated conduct.

The potential to come into contact with undesirables, explicit song lyrics and inappropriate content means Common Sense Media, the leading source of entertainment and technology recommendations for families, rates TikTok as suitable only for those over 16, the same rating it gives Snapchat. In comparison, its view is that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are suitable for those aged 15 and up.

In addition, it’s always sensible to supervise them while they use it. If you can’t ensure that all online activity takes place in a central location in the house, insist that the bedroom door is open while your child is online. If you want to read more, you’ll find some very useful tips at www.esafety.gov.au.