TikTok Balkans: Alarm Bells over Child Access to Video App

Six months passed before his parents found out, and the boy, from the Albanian port city of Durres, had already been duped into downloading a photo app containing what he described as "embarrassing photos", without elaborating.

The teenage boy, who like other minors interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity with the permission of his legal guardian, is one of a growing number of Balkan children using the Chinese-owned social networking service based on short-form videos, the most popular website in 2021, according to US-based Cloudflare.

BIRN has found that many of those children are below the minimum age requirement of 13 and some are accessing TikTok on a regular basis from six or seven years of age in the full knowledge of their parents.

A BIRN survey and dozens of face-to-face interviews with teachers, parents and children point to a gaping 'technology gap' that means many parents are unaware of what their children are exposed to on the service.

More than two thirds of parents said their children opened TikTok accounts before the age of 13, half of them without parental consent. Twenty-five per cent of parents said they had noticed potentially harmful content.

Experts say children are particularly vulnerable to bullying and harassment online, and often parents do not notice until it is already too late.

There might be a ban on access to social networks before the age of 13, but in Serbia, for example, "there is no control in that regard," said digital communications expert Nikola Ristic.

"Parents often do not know enough about how to approach children during their informal learning, which is present from the earliest age of a child when it comes to the Internet and content consumption."