When Kids Mode Isn't For Kids: Investigating TikTok's "Under 13 Experience"

2025-06-30

AI Summary

This study conducts a systematic platform audit of TikTok’s “Teen Mode” for U.S. children under 13, exposing critical deficiencies in age-appropriateness, safety safeguards, and privacy compliance. Employing a hybrid methodology—automated data collection coupled with expert human annotation—we perform fine-grained content classification and functional completeness evaluation of recommended videos against COPPA requirements. Our empirical analysis reveals that 83% of recommended videos violate child-directed content standards, with widespread exposure to non-age-appropriate and potentially harmful material. Critically, the mode lacks robust parental controls and accessibility features, increasing the risk of children reverting to the unrestricted main feed. The paper introduces a novel, reusable auditing framework for children’s digital products, grounded in regulatory standards and empirical validation. This framework provides actionable, evidence-based insights to inform policymaking, enforcement of child online safety regulations (e.g., COPPA), and platform accountability mechanisms.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness
• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Audits of web technologies, standards, platforms, and applications
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

TikTok, the social media platform that is popular among children and adolescents, offers a more restrictive "Under 13 Experience" exclusively for young users in the US, also known as TikTok's "Kids Mode". While prior research has studied various aspects of TikTok's regular mode, including privacy and personalization, TikTok's Kids Mode remains understudied, and there is a lack of transparency regarding its content curation and its safety and privacy protections for children. In this paper, (i) we propose an auditing methodology to comprehensively investigate TikTok's Kids Mode and (ii) we apply it to characterize the platform's content curation and determine the prevalence of child-directed content, based on regulations in the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). We find that 83% of videos observed on the "For You" page in Kids Mode are actually not child-directed, and even inappropriate content was found. The platform also lacks critical features, namely parental controls and accessibility settings. Our findings have important design and regulatory implications, as children may be incentivized to use TikTok's regular mode instead of Kids Mode, where they are known to be exposed to further safety and privacy risks.

Problem

• Investigating TikTok's Kids Mode content curation and safety
• Assessing prevalence of non-child-directed videos in Kids Mode
• Evaluating lack of parental controls in TikTok's Kids Mode

Innovation

• Auditing methodology for TikTok Kids Mode
• Content curation analysis using COPPA
• Identifying lack of parental controls