The video-sharing app TikTok briefly went dark in the US on Jan. 19, days after a Supreme Court ruling upholding a law requiring that it be sold by its Chinese owner, ByteDance.

But in one of his first official acts as president, Donald Trump revived the app, signing an executive order instructing the Justice Department to delay implementation of the law for 75 days, effectively implementing a stay while his administration attempts to broker a deal to keep the app up and running for its 170 million U.S.-based users.

Thousands, perhaps millions, of those users are children. While TikTok has set the minimum age for an account to 13, circumventing this rule is as easy as entering a false date of birth. TikTok regularly suspends the accounts of users who appear to be under 13 years of age, but this doesn’t prevent them from making new accounts with different user names and birthdates.

Since most kids have access to some kind of a screen every day, the result is that a lot of kids are spending time on TikTok, which is known for captivating viewers of all ages for hours with its algorithm and endless scrolling.

A study published this month in the journal Academic Paediatrics analysed data collected between 2019 and 2021 from over 10,000 young people in the U.S. ages 11-15.

A majority (69.5%) reported having at least one social media account. TikTok was the most popular platform, with 68.2% of respondents under age 13 having an account. The other apps most popular with 11- and 12-year-olds were YouTube (62.9%), Instagram (57.3%) and Snapchat (55.2%).

Dr Jason Nagata, professor of paediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco and one of the study’s authors, told HuffPost, “this highlights a significant issue with the current age verification processes, which are largely ineffective.”

Nagata and other experts are sounding the alarm about the potential consequences of using social media at a tender age, but there are things parents can do to reduce the risk of their children being harmed by dangerous content.

How does TikTok draw kids in?

“Social media platforms leverage powerful algorithms to deliver content that is highly engaging, visual and interactive,” Nagata said, describing TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed, which the company’s website describes as “a core part of the TikTok experience.”

TikTok uses machine learning to predict which videos an individual user is most likely to interact with and then populates their feed with these videos. A “similarity check” replaces videos that look and sound too much like one another to ensure just enough variety so that users don’t get bored. The system also filters videos by region. TikTok says its algorithm won’t recommend videos from users under 16 for the For You feed, but it’s hard to imagine that they are able to effectively implement this restriction given the large number of children who enter false birthdays to gain access to the app.

If you’ve ever used the app, you understand how effectively this system functions. Adults often talk about how they end up spending more time on the app than they intend to or even use the word “addiction” to describe their relationship with........

© HuffPost