US Parents Believe a TikTok Ban Will Increase Safety for Kids

With TikTok on the edge be removed from the USan interesting consideration is what parents think about removing the app and whether it will have a positive or negative impact on their children.

To be clear, TikTok’s impact on children is not the reason the US government wants to force the app into US ownership, with concerns about its ties to the Chinese government being the primary driver sales account.

But even so, TikTok is considered a negative influence in some respects, particularly in terms of content recommendations, attention span impacts, exposure to harmful content, and more.

So how do parents feel about the possible removal of TikTok from US app stores?

In order to provide some perspective, the team from security.org recently surveyed 1,000 American parents to get their insight into the situation.

First, around 50% of parents indicated they believed banning TikTok would improve children’s safety:

As you can see in these results, this doesn’t outweigh the potential benefit to creators, based on these responses, while there are also broader concerns about political censorship.

American parents also consider TikTok the “most dangerous” app for young people, along with Snapchat:

Although, as you can see, all social applications are considered problems in this regard.

The report also looks at what specific elements of TikTok and Snapchat are most problematic for parents:

With the best safety and security measures for teens in social apps:

All these elements are already in place, to some extent, in every application, although it is interesting to note how parents view such risks and what they think should be done about them.

Of course, with the removal of TikTok, the specific issues surrounding that app would be mitigated, but this will likely lead to other apps focusing more on it.

Overall, however, most parents seem to agree with TikTok staying and providing opportunities for creators, with appropriate safety and security measures in place.

This won’t matter in the immediate context of the bill, but it’s another element to consider in TikTok’s wider social impact.

You can view the full research report at security.org here.