Perhaps you can relate to this feeling – you send a message on TikTok not thinking much about it, and moments later you realize one of two things:
Either you sent it to the wrong person, or you changed your mind, no longer wanting the person to read what you had just wrote.
In either case, panic may set in, and you find yourself immediately wanting to delete the message.
This is a reality for many TikTok users. But is there a way to unsend TikTok messages, and will deleting sent messages also remove them from the other person’s TikTok account?
In this article, we’ll cover everything that you need to know.
Does Deleting A TikTok Message Unsend It?
TikTok allows you to delete any messages in your TikTok inbox, including those you receive as well as those you send. But if it’s deleted from your inbox, does it also delete it from the other person’s messages?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. Even if you delete a message on your TikTok account, it will still be delivered on the other person’s device, and they will be able to read it regardless of whether or not you delete it.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but unfortunately there is no way to delete a sent message.
The only thing that may help is if you immediately block the person, but even this won’t be effective if the person has already read your message.
After all, there is no way to delete the message from someone’s mind and they are even more likely to remember what you said if you immediately block them afterwards.
Therefore, there is no ideal solution to this problem.
While we hope that TikTok will add some ability to recall sent messages later on, it seems unlikely. Few social media websites have this feature and even new chat applications generally don’t implement it.
However, a few messaging apps that allow you to recall sent messages include Privates, Telegram, Wire, and Session.
Therefore, if deleting sent messages is an important feature to you, you may convince some of your friends to switch over to some of these more secure messaging apps.
See: How Many TikTok Accounts Can You Have (And 4 Reasons Why You Should Have Multiple)
Comments Are An Exception
While you can’t delete DMs that you send to other people, you can delete comments that you’ve left on other people’s videos.
Additionally, you can delete comments that people leave on your TikToks, too.
All you have to do is visit the comment in question, hold down on it for a moment, then tap on ‘Delete’. The comment will be permanently deleted, and no longer visible to yourself or others.
You can even take this a step further if you want, and restrict who can comment on your TikTok videos.
By going to your settings, you can restrict it so only friends can comment on your videos.
Additionally, you can add a keyword blacklist, effectively creating a filter for any comments that appear on your videos. By going to Settings -> Privacy -> Comments – Filter keywords and toggling this to ‘On’, you can type in a list of banned keywords.
If someone leaves a comment on one of your videos containing one of these keywords, it will be automatically hidden to everyone – kind of like a shadowban, but for your specific videos.
This is a neat little feature that not many TikTokers know about!
Conclusion
Currently, TikTok has no way to delete any sent messages. Any videos you find stating that it’s possible are staged or fake.
Therefore, you need to be careful that you’re only sending messages that you’re absolutely certain of, and double check who you’re sending messages to before you press the send key.
I hope that this article answered your questions. If you have any questions about TikTok, please feel free to ask them using the comment form below.
Thank you for reading,
– James McAllister