This feature has gone under the radar of many users across the app. If you’ve found an error in your initial birthday input or want to update your age, here’s a quick guide on the steps you need to take.
An Underrated Feature
The app targets users based not only on what they watch and what creators they follow but also on the users’ ages. This has led to concerns regarding privacy and content situations, especially for users under 18. TikTok shows utterly different content to people aged 18 compared to its underaged users, who themselves number in the hundreds of millions. The app claims the “full TikTok experience” is for users 13 and up.
In 2021, TikTok changed its privacy settings, one of which was that any users under 16 would have their profiles made private by default. The ability to change your birth date in the app was also removed. Because of these chatoder to change your birth date on TikTok, you’ll have to contact the customer service team yourself.
How to change your age
There are two ways to edit your age if you initially entered an incorrect one. The first method, which is also the simplest, is to make an entirely new account. If that doesn’t sound appealing, which is probably the case for most users, the other option is to email TikTok at [email protected]. As part of the app’s new rules, you must also produce accurate identification of the TikTok once they get back to you.
Here’s a step-by-step by step walkthrough on how to contact the TikTok customer service team:
- Open your TikTok app on your iPhone or Android device.
- Tap “Profile” at the bottom right of your home screen to view your own account.
- Tap on the three lines at the upper right-hand corner to open up a sidebar.
- In this sidebar, go to the Settings and Privacy section and scroll down until you find the Support subsection.
- In the support section press “Report a Problem.”
- Find the Account and Profile section.
- Click “Editing Profile.”
- This brings you to a section of Topics – select the one labeled Other.
- Click the “Need more help?” option.
After these steps, you will be taken to a feedback form where you can manually type in your request (in this case, to change an inaccurate date of birth).
The Importance of Age on TikTok
There is another side to the issue of user age and its relation to the content they see. It’s the entire reason that these rules changed to make it more difficult for instantaneous changes and to require official identification in order to make major changes to your account. There is already an increasing effort by TikTok to make more privacy and safety measures available to people, but that doesn’t take away from all of the data that it collects from you in that time.
There is already major controversy surrounding the content that TikTok’s algorithms regularly promote, as well as the fact that the app collects an absurd amount of data from minute details. TikTok will decide the next best video to show you based on absolutely everything, even how long you spend watching a video before scrolling down or whether you watch it at all. It’s not just about the content you choose to follow or the creators you want to keep up with – the app decides for its users what it wants to show them.
Obviously, this means that underaged children who use the app are going to be targeted by the algorithm. They might come across content inappropriate for their age, and the algorithm might end up showing more of it based on its popularity with older audiences. The influence of the app is obvious, as it has even affected real-life fashion trends over time due to how popular they become on the app. The change in policy is definitely a step in the right direction – it requires whoever’s changing their age to provide a good reason for the switch. This may prevent people who want to change their age out of impulse or for inadequate reasons from going through with it, where they would’ve been able to do so simply beforehand.
