TikTok Scrutinizes Public Videos to Regulate Users’ Ages, Vetting Potentially Underage Users on the Platform
Syed Imran Haider 
Shou Zi Chew attended the Congressional hearing yesterday, where he answered many questions about how the social media platform uses biometrics. TikTok CEO offered the audience some insight into the way the company examines potentially underage users on social media. He denied claims, saying the app collects face, voice, or body data to identify its users’ age.
The U.S. made the TikTok CEO stay in the hot seat and poised to explain the techniques used by the company for age verification. The show witnessed blustering politicians putting on the platform rather than getting factual answers. He also addressed questions related to what TikTok’s in-app AR filters need to function and how the app determines its users’ ages.
Chew revealed TikTok benefits from age gating to meet the purpose. It is a most frequently used method that asks users to provide their date of birth to determine their ages. TikTok sees three diverse experiences, including those under 13, younger teens, and adults of 18 and above. Most tech platforms believe that relying on this method alone could be a problem for them.
Children signing up on social media websites and apps often miscommunicate their age. TikTok does more than only look at the user input into a text box. The company scrutinizes users’ videos to regulate their age.
Age Determination Tools
According to Chew, the company has also developed a few tools where it looks at their public profile to examine their uploaded videos to see whether it is available to the public. Accordingly, if a user posts a video, they can decide whether or not they let their visual content go public. It is how they get people to view their videos.
TikTok looks at those to verify if the video matches the age as inputted by the user. Privacy versus age assurance could be a real challenge and a significant problem for the industry. Other interesting questions to the CEO were how TikTok would scan these videos and what specific technologies it uses, including facial recognition.
Follow-up questions also included whether the company built those technologies in-house or relied on facial recognition technology developed by a third party. Carter reportedly blasted the TikTok CEO for discharging the age verification tool as an industrywide problem. He exclaimed, saying we talked about children dying and referenced the harmful apps., including TikTok and others, having allowed the blackout challenge.
That challenge led TikTok to remove some half a million Italy-based user accounts from the platform following the request of a local regulator. The U.S. laws do not have any element around children and teens using social media, which lets tech firms like TikTok develop their separate processes.
Factually, age verification is a significant concern. Instagram started its user age verification last year. It offered users three options, allowing them to either record their video selfie, upload an ID document, or request their mutual friends to confirm their age. Most found the last option easy to bypass since good friends are usually willing to lie to their buddies.
In March, Instagram launched a new age verification tool in Mexico and Canada with existing support in Brazil, U.S., and Japan. The company told the digital media that it partnered with Yoti, a London-based digital identity startup, for assistance in the video selfie segment of the age verification process.
TikTok documents how to verify its users’ age if it identifies a user incorrectly entering their age. In 2021, TikTok had a meeting with facial age-estimation software providers. They offered software capable of telling the difference between adults and children. However, a TikTok executive rejected the deals fearing that the facial scanning type would spark the idea that China wanted to spy on child users.
