“I Feel Exposed”: Caught in TikTok’s Surveillance Web

This report, produced by Amnesty's International Secretariat, explores how TikTok’s highly personalised ‘For You’ feed, used by millions of children and young people worldwide, is driven by a surveillance‑based business model that puts children’s rights at risk. It exposes discriminatory protections, inadequate safeguards, and the urgent need for stronger regulation to protect children online.

TikTok’s highly personalized ‘For You’ feed has helped it to become, in the space of a few years, one of the most popular social media platforms in the world with over 1 billion users, many of whom are children between the ages of 13 and 17. But behind the never-ending feed of lip-syncing and dance craze videos is a highly extractive business model based on the collection of massive amounts of personal data on each user’s behaviour on the platform and in some parts of the world, their activity off the platform, as well as in the physical world.

TikTok has introduced some changes to ensure greater respect of children’s rights, but they differ from region to region. This differential treatment for child users in some parts of the world is discriminatory and TikTok should immediately extend the same rights-respecting policies to all child users globally.

The failure of TikTok to put in place adequate policies to respect the rights of children shows that stronger laws and regulation on data protection and algorithmic amplification of content on social media, as well as effective enforcement, is needed to keep children safe. It is essential that states move quickly to introduce and enforce comprehensive laws to rein in their surveillance-based business models.

Download and read the full report via the link above.