Millions of kids use the TikTok App every day to have a shot at fame but their parents are now in a spot of bother, in rather dismay.
The new social media app beat giants like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram in the first half of 2018, becoming the most downloaded application on the Apple’s App Store.
Following its 2017 purchase of Musical.ly, the site boasted 500 million users as of June.
TikTok is seen by the experts as a replacement for Vine, which had a six-second model. Vine nosedived due to a lack of a sustainable business model.
Brian Solis, a principal analyst at Altimeter Group said, “TikTok capitalises on short-term creative content that other platforms don’t encourage, by their design and community”.
“If there is one thing Silicon Valley can learn from Chinese app development, it’s that it is tuned in to viral-as-a-service, meaning that their most popular apps have really been about making content and personas viral and also hyper-engaged”, the analyst added.
The US watchdog Common Sense says the app user should be at least 16 years old as it contains privacy risks.
Currently, the app can be used by anyone belonging to the age group of 12 and above.
Solis said that as the age limit is pretty low, one attracts greater varieties of dangerous characters.
In France, 38 per cent of the total youth in the age bracket of 11 and 14 have an account on the app, making it difficult for the company. Millions of accounts would get wiped off in case the age limit changes from 12 to say 16.
A petition which got signed by over 170,000 people in Indonesia resulted in a ban of the app. It later got lifted after TikTok representative promised to remove inappropriate content by hiring more people.
William Soally, a Frenchman whose 12-year-old daughter is a dance fan, took action after seeing warnings about TikTok on the internet.
“I talked about it with my daughter and we decided to remove the app from her phone,” Solly told a news agency.
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