TikTok brings a localised version of its 'Safety Centre' in ten Indian languages

TikTok fell under deep scrutiny earlier this month for violating children’s privacy law. The video-sharing app was fined a record $5.7 million by the US FTC for **collecting underage users' data** . [caption id=“attachment_6165981” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] Image: Reuters[/caption] But while the ByteDance-owned app announced a separate app for underage users to comply with regulations, and is making amends to its platform, TikTok has announced a localised version of its ‘Safety Centre’ in India. The ‘Safety Centre’ consists of safety policies, tools and resources, educates users about ‘protection measures’ while using the platform. The ‘Safety Centre’ is also available in ten Indian languages which include Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Oriya. It also links to two resource pages to tackle anti-bullying as well as an advisory for the upcoming General Elections. “With the launch of our localised Safety Centre along with our resource pages for Anti-Bullying and the General Elections, we aim to reaffirm our commitment to India and ensure a safe and positive online environment,” Helena Lersch, Director, Global Public Policy, TikTok stated. To help shave off the fake news blitz ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha polls, TikTok is reportedly said to have encouraged its users to use the platform in a respectful, responsible manner and avoid uploading any illegal content. TikTok said that with the launch of the localised website in India it will better help users to learn to keep their accounts private, understand various online safety settings and avoid spreading personal information on the social platform. The **video-sharing app** recently launched comments filter feature to help users prevent hateful, obscene comments from appearing on their videos. The feature allows users’ to filter self-defined words in Hindi and English from the comments section. Users can use over 30 ‘defined words’ and change the listed words as per their preference. Reports note, that the popular video-sharing app has over 54 million monthly active users in India.