Yahoo Finance's Kelsey Barberio discusses changes TikTok is making to the platform to help live streamers target different audiences.

Video Transcript

- Well, TikTok is also out with some other news this week on its plan to grow with its consumers and thus making the move to introduce an adults-only option for live streamers on the platform, who may want to restrict their viewership to those 18 and older. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Kelsey Barbario, who is following this for us. Let's sort of define adults-only. People heard this and thought, whoa, where is TikTok going with all this?

KELSEY BARBARIO: I know. They're like, is this going to be the new OnlyFans? I don't think that is the intention whatsoever. TikTok is actually quite buttoned up with what they allow on their platform. But I think that the big takeaway here is that they're moving their live streams from right now, 16-year-olds and older. With a minimum of 1,000 followers, they're the ones that are eligible to Livestream. They're just bumping that up to 18. That's going to be on November 23.

But outside of that, people are going to be allowed to kind of clarify what audience might be the best suited for their Livestream. So say you've got, like, a comedy show that you're going to do on a live show-- or Livestream, excuse me-- and it's a little inappropriate for younger people, you can mark that and flag it as being for adults. So that way, the people under 18 are not seeing it.

- So part of this is about the maturation of their users, that they are going to be 18 and older. When you think about the demographic, TikTok also implementing further restrictions to the type of content they're going to be allowing there. I mean, what more do we know about that?

KELSEY BARBARIO: Yeah, so outside of the Livestreams, I think that they're looking into more safety practices overall. So for example, they have three different things that they're specifically honing in on. That's going to be hateful ideologies, eating disorders, and dangerous acts and challenges.

And I think that last one is most specifically targeted for children because think about things like the Tide Pod challenge from a million years ago, or more specifically, recently, the cooking chicken in NyQuil. That's the sort of stuff that they do not want to be affiliated with TikTok. And so they're really working on making sure that those practices absolutely are not allowed on the platform.

- How much of this is about what they've seen with the other platforms and getting out ahead with competitors like Instagram? I feel like there is a whole lot to do with that. I mean, you know, Congress has really been cracking down on social media platforms recently. And I think that they're just trying to get ahead of things before something might come on for them as well.