How to Limit Comments on TikTok

Your latest TikTok is blowing up, which is fantastic news for your engagement - but maybe not so fantastic for your peace of mind. As the views and likes climb, the comment section can turn into a battlefield of spam, trolls, and off-topic conversations. This guide breaks down exactly how to use TikTok’s built-in tools to limit, filter, and moderate your comments, so you can foster a healthier community and get back to creating.

Why Bother Limiting Comments on Your TikToks?

Before getting into the how-to, it’s worth understanding why managing your comment section is so important. It’s not about silencing your audience, it’s about shaping the culture of the community you’re building. A thoughtful approach to comment moderation can help you in a few key areas.

1. Protect Your Mental Health and Well-being

Let's start with the most important one: you. Creating content and putting it out there for the world to judge is vulnerable. An endless stream of negative, hateful, or just plain weird comments can take a toll. Limiting who can comment or filtering out toxicity is a non-negotiable form of self-care for creators. By setting boundaries, you make creating sustainable in the long run.

2. Cultivate a Positive and Safe Community

Your comment section is like the living room of your online brand. When it's filled with spam and negativity, potential followers and genuine fans might not feel comfortable sticking around. A well-moderated space, on the other hand, signals that it's a safe place for constructive discussion. This encourages higher-quality interactions and makes your existing followers feel valued and protected.

3. Reduce Spam and Irrelevant Chatter

Every popular TikTok video attracts spam bots promising free followers or linking to shady websites. Alongside them are users relentlessly promoting their own content. Filtering these out keeps your comment section clean, relevant, and focused on the actual topic of your video, making it a better experience for everyone.

4. Maintain Brand Safety

For businesses, personalities, and anyone using TikTok for professional purposes, moderating comments is critical for brand safety. You don’t want your video's comment section filled with offensive language, defamatory statements, or spam that might reflect poorly on your brand. Taking control ensures the conversation aligns with your brand’s values.

The Easiest Fix: Turning Off Comments on a Single Video

Sometimes you just want to post your content without opening the floodgates for discussion. Whether the topic is sensitive or you're just not in the mood to moderate, TikTok makes it easy to disable comments entirely on a per-video basis.

Before You Post a New Video:

During the final step before posting, you can disable comments from the start.

• On the Post screen (where you write your caption and add hashtags), scroll down and tap on More options.
• Look for the Allow comments toggle switch.
• Tap the toggle to turn it off. It will turn gray.
• Finish your post as usual. It will go live with comments disabled.

For a Video You've Already Posted:

Changed your mind about an older video? No problem. You can turn comments off (or back on) anytime.

• Navigate to the video on your profile.
• Tap the three dots (...) on the right-hand side of the screen.
• In the bottom menu that appears, swipe left until you find Privacy settings and tap it.
• Tap the Allow comments toggle switch to turn it off.

This is a quick and effective solution, but it is an all-or-nothing approach for that specific video.

A More Granular Approach: Controlling Who Can Comment on ALL Your Videos

If you want to set a sitewide policy for your account instead of tweaking every video, TikTok’s privacy settings are what you need. This lets you decide which groups of people are allowed to comment on your content by default.

Here’s how to find these powerful settings:

1. Go to your Profile tab.
2. Tap the three-line menu ('hamburger menu') in the top-right corner.
3. Select Settings and privacy from the menu that pops up.
4. Tap on Privacy.
5. Under the "Safety" section, tap on Comments.

Inside this menu, you'll see a section titled "Who can comment on your videos and Stories." You have a few options to choose from, each with a different strategic purpose:

• Everyone: This is the default setting. It allows anyone on TikTok to leave a comment, offering the highest potential for engagement but also exposing you to the most spam and negativity. It works well for brands aiming for maximum reach.
• Followers: A solid middle ground. Only people who follow you can comment. This incentivizes people to hit the "Follow" button to join the conversation and cuts down significantly on anonymous trolling.
• Followers that you follow back: Also known as "mutuals." This option restricts comments to only the people you follow who also follow you back, creating a very tight-knit and private-feeling community. It's an excellent choice for personal accounts or creators who want a highly curated comments section.
• No one: This setting turns off comments across your entire account for all new videos you post. It's a drastic step but can be useful if you're taking a break or dealing with a widespread harassment issue.

Choosing the right setting here acts as your first solid line of defense, defining the baseline level of openness for your community.

Your Secret Weapon: Advanced Comment Filtering

Beyond simply deciding who can comment, TikTok gives you incredible control over what they can say. These filtering tools are the most effective way to proactively stop problematic comments before you even have to see them.

You’ll find these tools in the same menu: Profile > Settings and privacy > Privacy > Comments.

1. Filter all comments

When you enable the Filter all comments toggle, every single new comment on your videos will be hidden until you manually approve it. Viewers won’t be able to see the comment until you give it the green light.

This offers the ultimate level of control. However, it's also extremely time-consuming and can stifle the back-and-forth flow of a natural conversation. This is best used temporarily for a particularly sensitive video or if your account is experiencing a coordinated harassment campaign.

2. Filter spam and offensive comments

This is TikTok’s automatic, AI-powered moderator. When turned on, it automatically detects and hides common spam (like "check my bio" comments) and comments that the system flags as potentially offensive or abusive. This filter is quite effective and is a great first step for any creator. It’s highly recommended you keep this enabled at all times, as it cleans up a lot of junk with zero effort on your part.

3. Filter keywords

This is arguably the most powerful comment management tool on TikTok. It lets you create a custom list of words or phrases, and any comment containing them will be hidden and sent to a review queue for your approval.

Tap Filter keywords to open the menu. Here's how you can use it effectively:

Actionable Keyword Strategies:

• Spam Keywords: Add common spam phrases like "link in bio," "follow for follow," "free followers," "DM me," and "promo."
• Negative or Abusive Language: Add any specific insults, slurs, or derogatory terms that trolls often use. You can also include subtle variations to catch them (e.g., using numbers for letters).
• Personal Information: If you're a creator who maintains a degree of privacy, you can filter out your real name, the city you live in, your workplace, or anything else you don't want discussed publicly.
• Brand Protection: Businesses can filter out the names of competitors, common customer service complaints they'd rather handle offline ("my order hasn't shipped"), or derogatory terms associated with their products.
• Controversial Topics: If your video touches on a sensitive subject, you can filter keywords related to political arguments or heated debates to keep the conversation on track.

Build your keyword list over time. Whenever you see a new type of annoying comment, just add its core phrase to your list.

Day-to-Day Moves: Managing Comments in the Wild

Filtering is for prevention, but you'll still need to do some active moderation. TikTok includes tools for dealing with comments one by one or in bulk directly from your video.

Deleting Comments

See a single comment you don’t want? Simply long-press on the comment and tap Delete from the menu that appears.

Reporting and Blocking Users in Bulk

When you're dealing with multiple trolls or a spam attack from several bot accounts, deleting comments one by one is too slow. The "Manage multiple comments" feature is a lifesaver.

• Long-press any comment or tap the three dots button (...) at the top of the comment section.
• Select Manage multiple comments.
• You can now tap the circle next to each comment you want to moderate. Select up to 100 comments at a time.
• Once you've selected all the offending comments/users, tap More at the bottom.
• From here you can choose to either Report the comments or Block the accounts.

Reporting flags the comments for TikTok to review against its community guidelines. Blocking is more direct, it removes the selected users from the comment section and prevents them from ever commenting on any of your videos or even viewing your content again. For persistent troublemakers, blocking is the best way to go.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, having control over your TikTok comments isn't about being restrictive, it's about curating a positive environment. Using these tools lets you defend your space proactively instead of just reacting to negativity, freeing you up to focus on what you do best: creating content that connects with people.

As your social presence grows, keeping up with comments across TikTok - not to mention Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and elsewhere - can become overwhelming. It’s a challenge we faced constantly, which is why we built a unified social inbox into Postbase. It allows us to view and respond to every comment and DM from all our connected accounts in one single, manageable feed. This way, we never miss an important conversation and can handle moderation in minutes instead of hours, without constantly hopping between apps.