How to Filter Comments on TikTok

Your TikTok comment section can either be a thriving community hub or a spam-filled nightmare. Taking control of what people can say on your videos isn't about censorship, it's about creating a safe, positive, and on-brand space for your real followers to engage. This guide will walk you through every tool TikTok gives you to filter, manage, and moderate your comments effectively.

Why Filtering Comments on TikTok Is a Game-Changer

Before getting into the technical steps, let's talk about why this is so important. A well-managed comment section is one of the most underrated assets for a growing brand or creator. Here’s why you should actively moderate it:

• Protect Your Brand Reputation: Trolls, spam, and outright offensive comments can damage how people perceive your brand. A clean comment section signals professionalism and care.
• Build a Safer Community: Your followers want to engage without being harassed or seeing hateful language. Active filtering makes your page a more welcoming place for your target audience.
• Save Time and Mental Energy: Manually deleting dozens of "buy my crypto" spam comments every day is draining. Setting up strong filters frees you up to focus on creating content and replying to genuine fans.
• Improve the Quality of Conversations: When you filter out the noise, the thoughtful, funny, and relevant comments from your actual community get more visibility. This encourages more of the same high-quality engagement.

Your Complete Guide to TikTok's Native Filtering Tools

TikTok gives you surprisingly robust, built-in tools to control your comments. You can find all of them in the same place. Here’s how to get there and what each setting does.

Step 1: Navigate to Your Privacy Settings

Before you can customize your filters, you need to know where to find them. It's buried a few menus deep, but it's easy once you know the path:

1. Open the TikTok app and go to your Profile.
2. Tap the three horizontal lines (☰) in the top-right corner to open the menu.
3. Select "Settings and privacy."
4. Tap on "Privacy."
5. Scroll down to the "Safety" section and choose "Comments."

You've now arrived at your comment control center. Every tool we discuss below lives on this screen.

Step 2: Choose Your Primary Filtering Level

TikTok offers several layers of protection. Your first move is to decide who is allowed to comment in the first place.

Who can comment on your videos

Right at the top, you’ll see an option to choose who can comment. Your options are:

• Everyone: The default setting. Anyone on TikTok can leave a comment, whether they follow you or not. This offers the widest reach but also the biggest risk for spam.
• Followers that you follow back: A more restrictive option. Only mutual followers (people you follow who also follow you back) can comment. This is great for a more private, community feel.
• No one: This turns off comments across all of your existing and future videos. It's an extreme measure but useful if you're taking a break or dealing with a wave of harassment.

Step 3: Set Up Automated and Keyword Filters

This is where the magic really happens. The "Comment filters" section gives you powerful control over what shows up publicly beneath your videos.

Filter All Comments

Toggling this on means that no new comment will appear on your videos unless you manually approve it.

• Who is this for? High-profile accounts, brands dealing with sensitive topics, or creators who want absolute control over the conversation.
• The Trade-off: It provides maximum safety but is extremely time-consuming. You will need to check your filtered comments queue regularly to approve legitimate interactions, which can slow down engagement.

Filter Spam and Offensive Comments

This is TikTok’s automatic, AI-powered filter. When enabled, TikTok will automatically hide comments that its system identifies as spam, advertisements, or offensive language. This is a must-have for basically everyone.

We recommend keeping this turned ON for all accounts. It’s a great first line of defense that catches the most obvious spam and abuse with zero ongoing effort from you.

Filter Keywords

This is your most powerful and customizable filtering tool. It allows you to create a custom list of words and phrases. Any comment containing a word from your list will be automatically hidden until you review it.

To use it, toggle the feature on and tap "Add keywords." You can add as many words or phrases as you'd like. This is your personal blocklist.

What keywords should you filter?

Getting your keyword list right can filter out 90% of the unwanted comments you receive. Here are some categories to inspire your list:

• Common Spam Phrases: "DM me," "link in bio," "collab," "check out my," "promo," and variations of Forex, crypto, and other common scams.
• Curse Words & Sensitive Topics: Add any profanity or slurs that TikTok's default filter might miss, as well as politically charged or sensitive terms you don't want to discuss on your page.
• Brand-Specific Terms: If you're a business, consider filtering the names of your direct competitors. This prevents people from promoting other services in your comments.
• Self-Identifying Trigger Words: Filter words related to personal details you don't want to be public, like your city, last name, or anything else you want to keep private.
• Variations & Misspellings: Smart spammers and trolls will try to get around filters by using misspellings or adding symbols (e.g., "cryp.to" or "m0ney"). Add common variations to your list to stay ahead of them.

Your keyword list is a living document. Add to it whenever a new, unwanted type of comment starts popping up.

Step 4: Reviewing Your Filtered Comments

Filters are great, but they aren't perfect. Sometimes a legitimate comment can get caught by accident. It's good practice to periodically review what your filters have hidden.

How to Review Hidden Comments

On the main Comments settings page, tap on "Review filtered comments." Here, you’ll see every comment that has been held back by your keyword list or TikTok’s spam filter.

For each comment, you have a few options:

• Approve: This makes the comment visible to the public.
• Delete: This permanently removes the comment.
• Report: If a comment violates TikTok's community guidelines (like hate speech or dangerous content), you can tap it and press "Report" to alert TikTok's moderation team. This can also lead to the user's account being penalized.

Try to get into the habit of checking this queue once or twice a week. It allows you to rescue any good comments caught in the net and helps you identify new keywords you should add to your filter list.

Advanced Comment Controls for Pinpoint Moderation

Beyond the primary filters, TikTok offers tools that help you manage comments on a video-by-video or user-by-user basis.

Turn Off Comments on a Single Video

Sometimes you anticipate a video will be controversial, or perhaps one has already been posted and is attracting negativity. You can disable comments for just that one piece of content without affecting your other videos.

• Before Posting: On the final Post screen (where you write your caption and add hashtags), tap on "More options" and toggle the "Allow comments" switch to off.
• After Posting: Navigate to the video you want to change. Tap the three-dot icon (...) to open the options menu. Swipe left on the bottom row of icons until you find "Privacy settings." From there, you can toggle "Allow comments" off.

Deleting Individual Comments and Blocking Users

Even with filters, an unwanted comment might slip through. You don’t need to go to your settings to manage it manually.

1. Long-press on the specific comment you want to remove.
2. A menu will appear. You can select "Delete" to remove it.
3. For repeat offenders, a better option is to tap "Manage multiple comments." This lets you select that comment (and several others) and then "Delete" or "Block accounts" all at once. Blocking a user not only removes their existing comments but also prevents them from commenting again in the future.

Remember: filtering prevents issues at scale, while blocking is the best solution for a persistent problem user.

Final Thoughts

Effectively filtering your TikTok comments is an essential part of growing a healthy, engaged community. By taking a few minutes to set up your automatic filters, build a custom keyword list, and handle problem users, you create a far better experience for yourself and your followers. It's a proactive strategy that pays off by saving you time and protecting your brand's reputation.

While these native TikTok tools are powerful for one platform, we know that managing comments and DMs across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube can quickly become overwhelming. At Postbase, we wanted to solve that chaos, which is why we built our Engagement feature with a unified inbox. It brings all your conversations from every platform into one clean DMs, allowing you to reply, assign, and manage your community without having to jump between a dozen different apps.