TikTok is giving you new ways to control your For You page

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A new level of control is being offered by TikTok. You will be able to specify specific words or phrases you don't want to see in your feeds, and the app will automatically remove them. TikTok has simple examples, such as when you just finished a renovation and don't want to see a lot of home improvement videos, or when you don't want to see a lot of cooking instructions. You could use these kinds of filters to control your feed.

There are two new automated moderation and filters on the platform. Content Levels is a ranking system designed to keep mature content from being shown to young users. It was compared to the rating systems found on movies and video games. The videos that are okay one at a time but problematic in bulk are the ones that the other tries to avoid showing. This is a project that TikTok has been working on for a long time.

The platform has resisted giving users fine-grained tools for controlling the content they see. The For You page is where TikTok gets to tell you what you like, even though you can scroll to the following feed. The more TikTok can be an app, the better.

As problematic types of content become popular, it is difficult to be in that position. Understanding how users interact with and experience content is the same thing every social app struggles with. We don't know a lot about the health effects of TikTok.

TikTok has questions to answer about the content it chooses to recommend, but it is nice to see it giving users more control over their own feeds. The app has a "Not Interested" button that you can use to stop seeing videos from a particular user. The addition of the filters is similar to what other platforms have done.

Video descriptions and text-based stickers are the only things being looked at by the word-based filters. The platform could start to more deeply understand the content of its videos if they had their transcripts. As machine learning and language models continue to improve, the feature that filters out individual words could become more advanced. The moderation work of TikTok will benefit from that work as well. The more it knows about its viewers, the better it will be. It's difficult to figure out either.

New features will be rolling out in the coming weeks.