TikTok Clean Up User Accounts Under 13 Years Old

TikTok has reportedly deleted more than 7 million accounts allegedly used by children under the age of 13. (photo credit: Franck/unspalsh)

JAKARTA - Some users of the short video application TikTok are indeed young people. However, the company stipulates that the minimum age for using the app must be 13 years.

Citing Mashable, Friday July 2, against this background, TikTok is rumored to have deleted more than 7 million accounts allegedly used by children under the age of 13.

In its first transparency report in 2021, which was recently released, 11,149,514 accounts were removed for violating guidelines or terms of service. Meanwhile, 7,263,952 of them were allegedly used under the legal age.

"For the first time, we are publishing the number of accounts suspected of being underage deleted. This report covers the first three months of the year," said TikTok.

However, it is claimed that the deletion is only conjecture. Because there's no way to know for sure how many users under the age of 13 actually use TikTok. Because, the account that was deleted is the account where the user voluntarily enters their date of birth.

The company identifies users who are 12 years old when signing up for TikTok or younger. That number may be high, but according to TikTok, it makes up less than 1 percent of all registered users.

In addition, TikTok also highlighted that users under the age of 12 can sign up for a specially curated version of the platform oriented towards their age group. While users aged 13 years and over are allowed on the TikTok platform. The company did launch a special arrangement for those under 18 earlier this year.

The default account settings for users between the ages of 13 and 15 are set manually, there are also limits on who can download their videos and engage with their content. Similar regulatory restrictions apply to users between the ages of 16 and 17.

However, there are still many users who manipulate their age by entering a fake date of birth. For this problem, TikTok has not found a solution. The same thing happened to Twitter a few years ago, which suspended underage accounts. But of course, there are still many users who fake their birth date, and it's quite difficult to solve.