TikTok has announced the launch of its Effect House feature to allow its users to create and share Community Effects.
Closed in beta since Autumn 2021, the launch of this new offering will see creators, designers, and developers worldwide use their skills to add to TikTok's effects.
Noting that creative effects are critical to the TikTok experience, the company says Effect House offers tools and learning resources to give creators intuitive design and development technologies to allow them to build immersive and dynamic effects for the platform's global community.
TikTok says the early beta stage of the Effect House offering saw more than 450 users publish effects they made with the feature, which then inspired the creation of over 1.5 billion videos with a total of more than 600 billion views globally.
The company says the expansion of Effect House will enhance this offering, and it looks forward to seeing what the future holds for its user base.
In addition to this latest offering, TikTok says it is focused on ensuring safety, authenticity and inclusivity on its platform when it comes to its community engaging with effects.
As a result, the company has created Effect Guidelines to accompany its existing Community Guidelines, which outline additional policies intended to help everyone on TikTok feel safe and supported.
These guidelines include not allowing colourism or negative stereotypes to be perpetuated through effects or effects that encourage physical appearance to be scrutinised, such as cosmetic surgery.
Furthermore, TikTok's Trust and Safety team will review all submitted effects prior to their release to the wider community to make sure the guidelines are being followed.
Elaborating on this, TikTok says effects that violate the guidelines will be removed, and the creator will be notified, after which they will have an opportunity to appeal the decision.
Users will also be able to report effects they believe are not adhering to TikTok's policies using the ‘Report Effect' feature.
The announcement of this extended offering comes after new research from Avast has revealed that older and younger generations are being targeted by different online threats based on the primary device that they use to go online.
The research, which forms part of a comprehensive global study with YouGov into digital citizenship trends, found that the most important internet activity for 18-24 year olds is using social media (37%). For 25-34 year olds, it's staying in contact with friends and family via messenger services and emails (40%), and for 35-44 year olds, it's banking and finance activities (40%). This shows why the younger generation is targeted on their smartphone with scams on Instagram and TikTok, FluBot SMS and email phishing scams that look like they've come from friends or family, and mobile banking Trojans.
This results in younger New Zealanders becoming targets for Adware, mobile banking Trojans, downloader and FluBot SMS scams spreading malware, and Instagram and TikTok scams promoting adware apps or Fleeceware.