Italian authorities slap minimum age requirement on TikTok

TikTok has found itself once again in the public eye for an issue pertaining to a minor, this time in Italy. Specifically, Italian authorities requested that TikTok blocks all users on its platform who report their age as 13 or under.

This comes after the death of a girl aged just 10 whose death has been attributed to one of TikTok’s many viral challenges, this time involving the user holding their breath. Italian prosecutors in the city of Palermo, in which the incident took place, are still engaged in ongoing investigations.

TikTok has experienced a massive upsurge in users over the past year or so, particularly after millions of people became confined to their homes due lockdown measures.

It was reported that by the fourth quarter of 2020, roughly one in six Americans were engaged TikTok users on a weekly basis. The company was estimated to have 53.5 million weekly users in America alone at that time, according to analytics company App Annie.

In Europe, the Chinese-owned company is reported to have surpassed 100 million active monthly users, with about 17 million of them being in the United Kingdom, 11 million in France, 10.7 million in Germany, 8.8 million in Spain, and 9.8 million in Italy.

In terms of child safety, a topic which refuses to go away for the company, TikTok will go beyond monitoring things from its own end and will give some of that power and responsibility to the users themselves.

European users will be able to report accounts whose owner appears to be younger than the minimum age of 13. The addition of this functionality was confirmed recently by Tiktok’s head of child safety in Europe Alexandra Evans.

Finally, pending approval from the Irish privacy authority, which also acts as the European Union’s main authority on data privacy and data protection, TikTok will also deploy methods using artificial intelligence to identify and remove users who are under the minimum age.