Nope. My DD is also 12 and she doesn't even have a phone. Her friends are all over TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. even though none of them is 13. To them, I am Draconian. To me, they are zombies who stare at their phones and have lost their capability for basic socializing. I am holding the line also.

WSJ did an excellent investigative piece on Tik Tok where they set up teenage bots. As just one finding among many Tik Tok does not do anything to prevent teen accounts from accessing videos marked as adults only. In fact, Tik Toks algorithm will show those videos to teens.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investigation-11626877477

Why does anyone willingly let their child use TikTok?

Several months ago I saw a tiktok that i so wish I could find. It was just a young woman, standing in front of the camera with her arms crossed and kind of a ticked off expression in her face. The disco filter was on and some kind of music was in the background, and the text on screen just said, “can Gen z make a pact to never give our kids cell phones?”

The video had over a million likes, and the comments were full of other members of Gen z talking about how much the internet messed them up.

I’m so glad I saw that. I’ll never give my tween or young teen TikTok or any other form of social media.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I looked around on it. Without much effort I found a lot of hard core porn.

+1 there are articles about how its algorithm preys on young kids and girls and exploits their anxieties. seriously please for your daughter's sake do not let her.

True:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techtimes.com/amp/articles/265145/20210908/tiktok-algorithm-allows-explicit-content-teenagers-bots-serving-up-videos.htm

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I looked around on it. Without much effort I found a lot of hard core porn.

WTF side of TikTok are you on??? Either you're just lying, or you and the rest of the world have different definitions of hard-core porn

Nice try kid. Not going to help you. Go find your own porn.

Maybe they can use TikTok to follow the antics of Coco Briscoe:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/coco-briscoe-arlington-tiktok-bartenders/2021/08/14/602f747e-f93c-11eb-943a-c5cf30d50e6a_story.html

Anonymous wrote:I looked around on it. Without much effort I found a lot of hard core porn.

WTF side of TikTok are you on??? Either you're just lying, or you and the rest of the world have different definitions of hard-core porn

Anonymous wrote:I looked around on it. Without much effort I found a lot of hard core porn.

+1 there are articles about how its algorithm preys on young kids and girls and exploits their anxieties. seriously please for your daughter's sake do not let her.

I think I’m going to allow social media when my kids are 16. I think that that’s past the seriously vulnerable part of adolescence, and I figure that when they are 18 they will use it in their own anyway and this way I can at least be involved a bit in their social media usage.

My kid feels left out and I would really love to say yes because it is a bummer. And I hate all her begging and pleading. But no, I care too much about her to give her access at age 12. She already has issues with body insecurity and anxiety, I’m not going to give her tiktok and Instagram and risk totally exacerbating that.

Before we deleted TikTok, dd found this racist video (it’s still up on YouTube, unfortunately):

Racist, including anti-Asian videos, are all over TikTok.

We deleted it.

The “n” word is all over TikTok in the song lyrics the kids dance to on TikTok.

My almost 14 year old still doesn’t have access. She can watch it on her friends phones but doesn’t need full access to that stuff.

My now 15yo DD has had TikTok for several years, since before the name changed from "Musicly".

Early on, our biggest issue was less the content she was viewing and more the content she was creating. She was posting some things that were inappropriate- either because of words in the songs she used or in that it as revealing too much personal information. So that is a real risk.

We had lots of conversations as a result and have not had issues in years.