TikTok announced today it would be expanding its partnership with the National PTA in the U.S., in an effort to empower parents to help their teens understand digital safety, as well as how to spot potentially risky and dangerous behaviors online.

TikTok’s latest initiative on this front will see it contribute funding to bring the PTA’s “Create with Kindness” program to more high schools across the U.S., which aims to facilitate conversations between teens and their families about online safety.

As per TikTok:

“As a longtime PTA Connected sponsor, we’re proud to support National PTA’s initiative focused on digital safety and well-being, access and equity, and digital literacy. For this school year, TikTok is making it possible for National PTA to award over $300,000 in funding to 100 local and regional PTSAs at high school campuses across America to help them bring Create with Kindness to life, an interactive program designed to help facilitate conversations between teens and their families about online safety and civility, and how to create positive digital boundaries together.

To that end, the program makes a variety of guides about online safety available to schools that can organize events locally in order to increase awareness, as well as answer questions about key concerns.

PTA has already run various events of this type and thanks to the additional funding can roll out the program to more regions.

And TikTok itself will also directly be involved in these events.

This school year, National PTA and TikTok, in partnership with the relevant state PTA and local PTSA, will co-host five Create with Kindness marquee events with PTSA high school students, their parents and caregivers, and faculty. These events will explore their experiences and expectations when navigating the online world and deepen their knowledge of TikTok's safety features."

Finally, TikTok will also be updating its Parents Guide with new insights on how best to communicate online safety and how teens should be well-informed about things to look out for, especially in the social apps.

The guide, which was created in collaboration with National PTA, describes TikTok's so-called Family Pairing tools, through which caregivers can tailor a variety of content and privacy settings for their teenagers; it also briefly describes TikTok's age appropriate settings that would be automatically switched on for both younger and older teens.
This is a particularly key area of focus for TikTok in particular, since the app continues to face criticism regarding its influence on teens and the potential damaging impacts of its addictive elements. Indeed, several regions are now considering bans on social media for younger teens, based on a range of concerns, with harmful exposure and addictiveness being among the primary issues, and as such, it's important that the apps themselves demonstrate a desire to address such as best they can.

This would be another conducive measure towards ensuring wider understanding rather than blanket bans that could increase more risk.