Wegovy, a drug that has been specifically approved for treating obesity, also became popular on the platform after Elon Musk credited it for helping him lose weight. A 2025 meta-analysis found that use of TikTok was correlated with symptoms of anxiety and depression, with stronger links in females and users under 24 years old. Some users were able to circumvent TikTok filters by writing in code or using unconventional spelling. Daily hours of entertainment screen media (Social Medias) may displace healthy behaviors such as socializing face to face, chores, hobbies, homework, family meals time, exercise, and sufficient sleep. A trend making fun of autism eventually created a huge backlash, even on the platform itself, and the company ended up removing the hashtag altogether. In February 2024, the European Commission launched an investigation into TikTok for potential violations of the Digital Services Act (DSA), involving content aiming at children and advertising transparency.
Restrictions and bans
The Ministry of Education (Taiwan) has warned against the harmful impact of TikTok and related app RedNote on body image and ensuing self harm related to weight loss especially in teenagers. As of March 2025update, strong scientific understanding of TikTok’s effects on user’s mental health „remains elusive“. In 2021, the platform revealed that it will be introducing a feature that will prevent teenagers from receiving notifications past their bedtime. Additionally, the app features a dashboard with statistics on how often the app is opened, how much time is spent browsing it and when the browsing occurs.
It also announced that US user traffic would now be routed through Oracle Cloud and that backup copies would be deleted from other servers. Following the reports, TikTok confirmed that employees in China could have access to US data. As a consequence, the Senate Intelligence Committee including US lawmakers Mark Warner and Marco Rubio called for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to investigate ByteDance and whether TikTok had misled them.
YouTube Kids
- In March 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that TikTok’s growth in the US had stagnated.
- These creators would often attend red carpet premieres of movies and interview the celebrities in attendance, which was the subject of significant debate as some considered the questions the creators asked to be disrespectful.
- Shop right from shoptab, videos or LIVEs without leaving the app, track your orders with ease, and enjoy a safe, secure shopping and transaction process.■ Obtain access to LIVE benefits to better interact with hosts!
- Some videos were shown to expressly promote Holocaust denial and told viewers to take up arms and fight in the name of white supremacy and the swastika.
- It covers the „top 4% of all videos on TikTok“ and is only available to creators with more than 100,000 followers.
- However, a few days later, users on Twitter discovered that the software uses code from the open-source OBS Studio.
In April 2024, TikTok users started receiving notifications that their current and future picture posts would be shown on a new app called TikTok Notes. Under the deal, the app will remain the same, and the algorithm will be adjusted over time to favor American topics for those users. The Financial Times reported that TikTok will launch a video gaming channel, but the report was denied in a statement to Digiday, with TikTok instead aiming to be a social hub for the gaming community. In July 2020, TikTok, excluding Douyin, reported close to 800 million monthly active users worldwide after less than four years of existence. In January 2019, TikTok allowed creators to embed merchandise sale links into their videos.
The momentum of digital feminist movements through platforms like TikTok have additionally encouraged many social media agents and marketing campaigns around the world to adopt some degree of feminism as a part of their online image or personal brand. In July 2025, Media Matters reported that Google’s Veo 3 text-to-video model for AI-generated content is being used to generate large numbers of dehumanizing and violent videos with racist and antisemitic tropes which are being shared on TikTok. In October 2019, TikTok removed about two dozen accounts that were responsible for posting ISIL propaganda and execution videos on the app. TikTok pushed back against the NCRI, saying that making „accounts that interact with the app in a prescribed manner“ is not the same as the experience of real users and some of the events being compared happened before TikTok existed. In 2019, The Guardian reported that TikTok had censored videos of topics not favored by the Chinese government.
In Malaysia, TikTok is used by some users to engage in hate speech against race and religion especially mentioning the 13 May incident after the 2022 election. TikTok has since released tougher parental controls to filter out inappropriate content and to ensure they can provide sufficient protection and security. As TikTok has gained popularity among young children, and the popularity of extremist and hateful content is growing, calls for tighter restrictions on their flexible boundaries have been made. Some videos were shown to expressly promote Holocaust denial and told viewers to take up arms and fight in the name of white supremacy and the swastika.
User Data Privacy
■ Watch endless amount of videos customized specifically for youA personalized video feed based on what you watch, like, and share. All you have to do is watch, engage with what you like, skip what you don’t, and you’ll ruhtinas find an endless stream of short videos that feel personalized just for you. On TikTok, short-form videos are exciting, spontaneous, and genuine.
- In April 2025, the Ireland DPC fined TikTok over €500 million for illegally sending European user data to China.
- Comment sections of „sexy“ videos, such as young girls dancing in revealing clothes, were found to contain requests for nude pictures.
- The US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia reportedly subpoenaed information from ByteDance regarding its surveillance of journalists on TikTok.
- This marked the company’s first instance of withdrawing its music from a major platform, in contrast to Warner Music, which had recently renewed its own licensing deal with TikTok.
- Content promoting cosmetic surgery is popular on TikTok and has spawned several viral trends on the platform.
- TikTok tends to appeal to younger users, as 41% of its users are between the ages of 16 and 24.
Data Not Linked to You
In 2020, TikTok updated their terms of service to ban content that promotes „premium sexual content“, impacting a large number of adult content creators. TikTok is regularly used by sex workers to promote pornographic content sold on platforms such as OnlyFans. In 2020, digital media companies such as Group Nine Media and Global used TikTok increasingly, focusing on tactics such as brokering partnerships with TikTok influencers and developing branded content campaigns. Existing sellers on FeetFinder said that the videos often misrepresented how „easy“ it is to make money from posting feet pictures. In 2022, it was reported that a trend called „de-influencing“ had become popular on the platform as a backlash to influencer marketing. TikTok reportedly made as much as a 70% commission on some of them, a figure that the company disputed.
The widespread popularity of these trends has influenced various aspects of society, including interest in cooking among younger generations, discussions about body image, the marketing of food products on social media, and temporary food shortages. Some TikTok users share personal recipes and dietary habits, while others use step-by-step cooking videos to grow their online presence. TikTok food trends refer to popular recipes and food-related fads on the social media platform TikTok.
Supported Features
In June 2023, TikTok confirmed that some financial information, such as tax forms and Social Security numbers, of American content creators are stored in China. In May 2023, a former ByteDance employee filed a wrongful termination lawsuit alleging that Hong Kong users‘ device information and communications, particularly those of demonstrators in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, were accessed by Chinese Communist Party members in 2018. Keeping user data within the United States became the motivation behind TikTok’s Project Texas. A March 2021 study by the Citizen Lab found that TikTok did not collect data beyond the industry norms, what its policy stated, or without additional user permission.
The company posted job listings for staff for a series of order fulfillment centers in the US and is reportedly planning to start the new live shopping business before the end of the year. The partnership entails the launch of an official NFL TikTok account, which is to bring about new marketing opportunities such as sponsored videos and hashtag challenges. The founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, stated that „China is home to only one-fifth of Internet users globally. If we don’t expand on a global scale, we are bound to lose to peers eyeing the four-fifths. So, going global is a must.“
The study compares data from before TikTok even existed to show the app has fewer hashtags about historically sensitive topics, distorting the findings. They have been replaced by versions customized by local teams for users in different regions. TikTok moderators were instructed to suppress posts from „For You“ recommendations if the users shown were deemed „too ugly, poor, or disabled“. Other human rights activists have also said that their TikTok videos discussing human rights violations of the Uyghurs have been taken down.
In other cases, however, Instagram and YouTube showed higher rates of pro-China content than TikTok. By searching for four keywords—Uyghur, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Tiananmen, the researchers found that TikTok returned a higher percentage of positive, neutral, or irrelevant content related to human rights in China. ByteDance said its early guidelines were global and aimed at reducing online harassment and divisiveness when its platforms were still growing.
