TikTok has pushed a new safety update in November to its app that allows parents to take more control of their teenager's accounts, as social media companies come under increasing pressure to make their platforms safer for children.

The company said Tuesday that its “Family Pairing” feature now enables parents to turn off comments on their children's videos entirely or to limit them to friends only. Parents whose accounts are linked to their kids will also be able to set their accounts to private, turn off the search function for content, users or sounds, and limit who can see which videos their children have liked.

Launched (发布) in March, the Family Pairing tool lets parents see how long their children are spending on TikTok each day and limit the content they can see.

TikTok allows children to register and create an account if they're over the age of 13. All they need to do is provide their date of birth. However, because TikTok doesn't require registers to prove their identities, some children under 13 have registered by lying about their age，according to U. K. regulator Ofcom (英国通讯管理局).

Alexandra Evans, head of child safety public policy for TikTok in Europe, told CNBC that Family Pairing has “put itself in parents’ shoes” since it was launched.

“If we're thinking about it as a toolbox, we wanted to offer more tools,” she said on a video call ahead of the announcement.

Can computer technology be used to steal an election? For the most part, innovative technologies promise to make people’s lives easier and more comfortable, but these innovations can also be a risk, particularly to democratic (民主的) processes.

In years past, people voted on paper ballots with a pen. Voters could look over their ballots to ensure that they did not make a mistake. Also when there was a dispute over the results of an election, paper ballots (选票) allowed election officials to count votes by hand. This process was long and tedious, but the results could be easily confirmed to see if there were any inconsistency between counts. Several countries still use this traditional system of voting and it provides a crucial foundation for ensuring fairness.

Today, however, voters cannot be sure whether electronic voting systems are reliably counting their votes. For example, a computer hacker could develop a program that redirected a person’s vote from one candidate to another. Although some people might think this is unlikely, problems with computer security have occurred throughout the world. The simple fact is that hackers can break into many computer systems for their own purposes. By illegally entering an online polling site they could change the outcome of an election. Jones and Simons, the co-authors of the book Broken Ballots, warn of such a possibility: “a risk of Internet voting is that the computer receiving the voted ballots could be attacked over the Internet by individual hackers, political operatives, foreign governments or terrorists”. Citizens should also question whether electronic voting enhances the voting process. As the old saying goes, “If something isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”

If a government decides to use an electronic voting system, it should ensure that all voters receive receipts for their votes that could then be collected for subsequent confirmation. These receipts would clearly indicate that the vote had gone to the selected candidate. Furthermore, if any candidate suspects that an election is unfair, these receipts could be counted by hand and checked against the computer results. At the very least, as Jones and Simons argue, voting should be a simple, secure, and consistent process, regardless of the voting procedure being used.

I'm an early user of social media. For the most part, I've enjoyed the time I've spent on the site. But like many friends I know, I was also starting to feel like my visits to Facebook were just a waste of time.

Of course, the obvious move would just be to steer clear of Facebook and other social media sites. But as a writer, I have to use social media several times a day. And once I'm in the site, it's almost impossible to take no notice of those notices reminding me of posts in my personal feed（信息推送）. I felt like I had to find the one or two meaningful posts that made my social media feed worth the time.

Then I came across a post by Melissa Hartwig, the founder of the Whole30 program. In the post she said "Don't act like social media just happens to you; make it work FOR YOU."

It hit home with me. I immediately set out to change the way I was using social media. I hid and unfollowed groups and accounts（账户）that were not adding something active to my life. I didn't stop to think. I just clicked my way through the feed.

I'm not burying my head in the sand. I continue to follow people whose opinions on different topics differ from my own, but their words are interesting and open-minded.

Then I limited my interaction（互动）on social media. Unless I had something to say, I no longer interacted. A study found that inactive use of social media has a bad effect on our mood, while active use—sharing thoughts and commenting on others' posts—improved mood.

The result? I can say without doubt that I no longer worry about getting into a time-wasting vacuum（真空）. That's because my feed is nowhere near as bottomless as it once was.