TikTok announced yesterday that it is testing a feature that will allow users to dislike individual comments on videos. In a blog post about safety and community guidelines enforcement, TikTok says that people can flag comments they find “irrelevant or inappropriate” without showing others that they dislike them. The new feature is currently being tested in select regions, excluding the United States.
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“These community comments will add to the range of factors we already use to keep the comments section consistently relevant and a place for genuine engagement,” TikTok says.
Once a user dislikes a comment, the negative mark will not be public and commenters will not be notified that their comment was disliked. Commenters and other users will also not be able to see how many times a comment has been disliked.
TikTok users can already dislike videos they don't like to indicate to the app that they're not interested in the content. The "dislike" button appears to be available in addition to the option to report a comment for violations of the community guidelines.
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TikTok said it sees the button as a way for users to flag comments that may be spam or that don't make sense in the context of the video they're posted to. The company explained that the "dislike" button is not considered a way to report comments, and that users should use the standard process for reporting comments for harassment, hate speech, bullying, etc.
The company also says it is experimenting with sending reminders about features like comment filtering and bulk blocking and deleting to creators who receive a high volume of negative comments. Decisions on whether to fully roll out the feature will be made in the coming weeks, according to TikTok.
In the transparency report released by TikTok, it says it removed more than 85 million videos between October and December 2021 for violations, about 1 percent of all videos uploaded to the app.
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If fully rolled out, the feature will join TikTok’s existing tools for creators, such as the option to filter all comments for manual review or filter comments that include keywords they’ve chosen. Users will also have the ability to choose who can comment on their content. For example, they can choose to allow anyone on the platform to comment, only people they follow, or no one.
