Cormac Keenan, Head of Trust and Safety, TikTok

Millions of Europeans come to TikTok every day to find entertainment and have fun. Our teams continually work to make TikTok a place where everyone can express their creativity.

Throughout the last year, we've continued to take a range of steps to better protect the safety of our community. We took the decision to make all new and existing accounts belonging to people under 16 private by default. We rolled out Family Pairing, a feature that enables parents to link their TikTok account to their teen's and enable content and privacy settings. And to protect against potential misuse, we turned off Direct Messaging for users under 16.

The challenges that face platforms like ours are complex and constantly evolving which makes partnering with outside experts vital. It's one reason why we have focused on expanding our engagement with outside safety experts. Through our Safety Advisory Council for Europe, we're looking forward to having even more opportunities to work with experts on a range of topics - from youth safety to hate speech - and they will act as critical friends as we continue to develop new ways to promote safety.

While we've made important progress, we don't see a 'finish line' when it comes to safety. It's our full intention to continue to assess our current policies and processes and listen to candid feedback. For example, following meetings with epilepsy experts last year, we listened to feedback and used it to introduce a series of new features to help protect people from photosensitive content.

As we continue on our safety journey we want to be open and transparent along the way. And in the coming weeks and months we'd like to talk more about the fundamentals of safety and highlight some of the behind-the-scenes work of our safety teams. We'll launch our first post - How our safety teams work to protect our community - on Friday.