While TikTok is stepping on the toes of major social media platforms, it’s not a social media platform itself; it’s a video-sharing app. However, a new feature that the company is pushing may change that just a bit. TikTok has now enabled DMs (Direct Messages), according to Phone Arena.
Right now, there’s a lot going on under the surface as far as TikTok is concerned. The China-based company is being eyed by the US government as a potential security risk. The app has more than 1 billion monthly active users. In order to operate, it needs several permissions from people.
It needs permissions like your camera, microphone, and photos and videos. This gives the company access to a ton of data on the users. That, of course doesn’t sit well with the American government. This resulted in a for TikTok on government devices.
TikTok now supports DMs
As with most other features, this one was in the oven for a couple of months before making it to the broad public. TikTok started testing out DMs back in November 2022 on a small group of people.
Before, people could only message if they both followed each other. However, the feature allows users to message anyone. That’s neat if you want to better connect with a creator who you admire.
But, giving people the ability to message anyone has its issues because… it’s the internet. In any case, we expect the company to let people disable messaging altogether. As you can imagine, a creator who’s gained 2 million followers off the back of lewd dances will be absolutely flooded with DMs.
Also, we can’t forget about plain old harassment. TikTok is home to 1.5 billion users, and a lot of them are colored, in the LGBTQA+ community, women, children, and so on. If TikTok doesn’t implement some sort of safety protocol with the DMs, that’d be a massive problem for the TikTok community.
This feature is now rolling out, so you’ll want to keep an eye out for an update coming to the app.
2023-01-27 15:07:17