TikTok is a relatively newer social media platform, compared to other giants that have quite been around for a while. Due to this reason, many people are still getting on the bandwagon now, meaning slowly and gradually learning the whats and hows of the platform. There are several commonly asked questions regarding the usage of TikTok, but we will specifically be focusing on how to delete a video on TikTok along with other content-related questions.
Previously we wrote about ‘how to find favorites on TikTok’, whether that’s people, videos, or music you find on the app, ‘how to save a TikTok to camera roll’ and ‘how to delete TikTok comment’. Because there were so many other questions regarding TikTok usage, we decided to continue that guide and extend it to answering more questions. We will be answering some commonly asked questions on how to use the app below.
How to delete videos on TikTok?
Often people have very specific themes within their TikTok account, so much so that like YouTube, TikTok has also developed sub-communities within its app, such as BookTok, MoneyTok, Roller Skating, and even a spirituality community among many other niche spaces. Due to this, reinventing oneself can be tricky. Instead of deleting your account, due to which you will have to accumulate your followers all over again, you can delete videos and rebrand the profile accordingly. Here’s how you can delete videos.
- On your phone, go to the TikTok app and from the main home page, go to the profile page. This will show you everything you have created and shared on your profile
- Find the video you want to get rid of from the grid, and click on it. It should now show on full view with just some options on the bottom right corner after your profile icon, from here click on the three horizontal dots, as shown below
- These three dots will take you to the full view of all the options you have. Here you will find the option to “Delete” Click on it.
- It will ask you if you are sure about deleting, press delete again from the two options.
Apart from one particular video, people also wonder ‘how to delete all liked videos on TikTok’ and the answer to this is, you cannot. You will have to delete videos one by one in order to empty your account, whether it’s others’ videos you have liked or your own videos you have uploaded.
If you just want to clear all your drafts, you can do so easily by clearing your TikTok app’s cache. TikTok itself does not have any direct option that lets you do so, but this is a hack you can use. Another critical thing to know here is that TikTok has a content download option available to subscribing users.
This means if you don’t have certain privacy settings on your account, your content is available for others to share to other platforms, as well as download and save for themselves. In this case, deleting a video will not help in getting rid of it from those that have it downloaded. Therefore, make sure you check your privacy settings if you don’t want everyone to access your content like that.
How to make a video private on TikTok?
Another question a lot of people seemed to have was how to make a video private on TikTok. This also makes sense for people who want to move away from creating content to just enjoying content created by others. Apart from that, there could be several reasons why you would want to make your video private for a temporary period of time, or otherwise.
This is why instead of learning ‘how to delete a video on TikTok’ you can learn how to make it private instead of the public to limit the viewing. This way, you will not have to delete your hard work and the amount of reach you have acquired through the video(s). The app allows you to either download the video yourself if you want to have a personal archive or save it in a private folder on the website/app. Moving on, you will need to follow these steps.
- Click on whichever video you wish to make private, and it will show full-sized. Here you will once again find the three dots on the bottom right, click on those
- From here, you will find a horizontal list of options within settings, find and click on “Privacy Settings” on here to go to the privacy settings for that particular video content
In privacy settings, you will find an option in the top bar to put the video in a private folder. If you are only checking how it works, here’s where you turn back. But if you want to make a video private, go ahead and put the video in your private folder and the general audience on the app will not be able to access it. Only you can see this video from here onwards until you move it back out for the followers to see or delete it completely.
How to delete a TikTok account?
There are moments while being in the digital media sphere when you decide to step back from it permanently. The decision to delete your TikTok account could come from a similar place, though you can also take a break from the site and come back with a fresh new account. In any case, you can choose to delete your TikTok presence easily, all you will have to do is add your phone number to your account.
This is important because previously you needed to send in a request to customer service which would take days before you could delete it. All you have to do now is to approve the request from your phone, for which you need to connect your phone number to your account. Here’s what to do, if you don’t have your phone connected to TikTok, if you do have it connected, miss the top few steps and go ahead to deleting.
- On your main profile page on TikTok, click on the three vertical dots on the top right corner
- From the list of options that show up, click on “Manage Account”
- Here tap on “Phone number” and enter your phone number in the space as shown below
- It will send a verification number or code to your phone, confirm that code by entering in the box that appears, and your phone is successfully connected to TikTok now.
- Now go to your main profile page again and click on the three dost once again
- Go to “Manage Account” once again
- At the exact button of this page you will find the option to “Delete Account”
- After pressing on delete account, your phone will automatically receive an OTP message, that you need to put in the box as shown below for verification
This step will successfully delete your account and everything connected to it, minus the message you have sent to other people. Since other people’s chats cannot be deleted by you or any user on the application, your chat with a person will show in their inbox or private messages as “user” or any other generic title for a user’s name. Those cannot be deleted by any direct option or hack.
Does deleting my account, delete all my videos?
This is a justified question to ask or wonder about because there are apps that do not delete content you have uploaded even when you delete or disable your account. Reddit is a huge example of this, we have answered questions on how you can delete a Reddit account and what it means for your content already up on the site. But to summarize the main question, deleting your Reddit account does not delete any of your posts or comments made from your account, it just shows a generic icon with your profile.
This is why, many wonder if TikTok follows a similar path, but fortunately it does not. That is to say, when you delete your TikTok account once, it deletes all of the personal information you had with your account, in addition to all the content you had, including any original audio or video content.
Hopefully, this guide helped you learn more than just ‘how to delete a video on TikTok’. These comprehensive guides with visual references are meant to help you understand the steps you need to take easily to every particular question.
SEO Team please add the link for the “Learn how to delete Reddit account: Deleting vs Deactivating” article here that i wrote in november, as i cannot find the article on nv website.
