This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on April 28, 2025 - May 4, 2025

Teenagers are increasingly becoming both victims and perpetrators of online crimes on social media platforms, driven by a combination of growing screen time, uneven digital literacy and anonymity on the internet. This trend warrants urgent intervention from parents, educators and law enforcement authorities to ensure a healthier online environment for teens.

As part of its efforts to enhance child and youth safety, TikTok is introducing stricter safeguards, says TikTok outreach and partnerships manager for Asia-Pacific, KahnJi Siriprapa Weerachaising.

“To help protect children and young people, all users are now required to pass a compulsory age gate before registering an account,” says KahnJi. “If they are under 13, they cannot register. Unlike some other platforms, our age gate is neutrally designed. This means that we do not indicate to new users at the point of sign-up what the minimum age requirement is. If someone does not meet our minimum age requirement, we suspend their ability to attempt to recreate an account using a different date of birth,” she tells Digital Edge during a media visit to TikTok’s Transparency and Accountability Center (TAC) in Singapore.

The number of online crime cases in 2024 was 35,368, with losses amounting to more than RM1.5 billion, stated the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) citing Polis Diraja Malaysia (PDRM) records.

The commission stated that online threats against children included over 2,240 recorded cases of sexual abuse. In the first week of January 2025 alone, MCMC received 4,699 content removal requests, 72% of which involved online gambling content.

KahnJi acknowledges that while most users provide accurate information about their age, some do not — a challenge faced by many online platforms.

“That’s why our commitment to enforcing our minimum age requirements does not end at the age gate, and we take a number of additional approaches to identify and remove suspected underage account holders,” she adds.

Recognising that children are among the most vulnerable on the platform, TikTok customises experiences for users aged 13 to 17. Children aged between 13 and 15 experience the platform differently compared to users aged 16 and 17.

For instance, TikTok sets a default daily screen time of 60 minutes for teen users. Accounts belonging to those aged 13 to 15 do not receive push notifications after 9pm, while notifications for users aged 16 to 17 are limited after 10pm.

TikTok has also developed a guardian’s guide, which offers an overview of the platform’s safety tools and controls. It provides parents with strategies to initiate conversations about online safety with their children.

The guide outlines the Family Pairing feature, which allows parents or guardians to link their TikTok account with their teen’s, enabling them to customise safety and privacy settings — including account type, comment permissions and screen time limits.

“In Malaysia, we launched a Parenting Safety session in June 2024, which brought together a panel featuring parenting creators, youth creators and a content forum to discuss how parents can be empowered to guide their teens to responsibly use TikTok in a way that allows them to express their creativity authentically while staying safe,” says KahnJi.

As social media platforms struggle to manage the sheer volume of user-generated content, KahnJi notes that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in moderation efforts is growing — though it still requires constant refinement and human oversight.

She shares that in December 2024, TikTok removed more than 2.1 million videos for violating its community guidelines.

“We managed to remove these in a span of three months. Almost 99.2% is proactively removed almost instantly, which means before anyone gets views, the content is removed through automated content moderation while over 89.1% of [reported content] is removed within 24 hours,” she adds.

This is enabled through a combination of human moderation and AI moderation tools, which were showcased at the TAC.

“We use a mix of technology and human moderation to monitor content on the app. With technology used to build for scale and human moderation for accuracy and context, we can continuously monitor TikTok and remove anything that violates our community guidelines,” she says.

For AI-based moderation, platform experts train algorithms to detect content that potentially violates TikTok’s guidelines using machine learning, computer vision and audio analysis.

“We show the machine pieces of content so that the first time it pops up, the algorithms will be able to spot it immediately. This applies not only to images; we train them on keywords, hyperlinks and audio sounds as well,” she explains.

According to TikTok’s 2024 Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, over 500 million videos were removed globally for policy violations, with more than 80% flagged through automated moderation. Last year, the company spent more than US$2 billion on trust and safety and is committed to investing a further US$2 billion in 2025 to maintain platform integrity.

However, in February this year, TikTok faced criticism after its AI content moderation system led to the temporary suspension of several Malaysian media accounts.

News reports revealed that 23 accounts were banned following coverage of the alleged sexual assault of a young girl at a mosque in Selangor on Feb 21. Most accounts have since been reinstated following intervention by MCMC, which had called for clarification.

“We protect our community by removing content and accounts that violate our rules and by reducing the visibility of content that is unsuitable for a broad audience. That is why our community guidelines establish a set of norms and common codes of conduct that provide a safe and welcoming space for everyone. They apply to everything and everyone on TikTok,” says KahnJi.

In Malaysia, TikTok partners with local organisations such as the Communications and Multimedia Content Forum of Malaysia, Jom Check, Pusat KOMAS, the Centre for Independent Journalism and Architects of Diversity to understand local sensitivities, fulfil regulatory requirements and ensure the platform’s approach reflects how online harm is experienced in different communities.

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