In this guide
You turn comments on in one of three places: on the post screen before you publish, in a published video's privacy settings, or in your account-level "who can comment" setting. If the toggle is grayed out, that is a restriction, not a bug, and the section below on locked toggles covers it.
Three things to have straight first:
On the final post screen, open the comment setting and allow comments before you publish. The exact label sits with the other privacy controls on that screen; confirm the current wording in your app, since TikTok moves these around. That same control is where you would turn comments off again, so it is worth knowing regardless of which direction you are going today.
This is the "fix it now" case, and it is the one most people arrive here for.
Open the published video's privacy or edit settings and re-enable comments there. The control is on the individual post, not in a global menu; check the live app for the exact path, because the wording shifts between versions.
The distinction that trips people up: this setting is per video. Re-enabling comments on one post does nothing for the rest of your feed. If you turned comments off across a batch of videos, you are re-enabling them one video at a time, or you are changing the default at the account level (next section) so it applies going forward.
If the option to re-enable is missing entirely on a given video, that is not a per-video problem. It is either an account-level setting or a restriction overriding you, and the two sections below tell you which.
This is the master default. Your account-level "who can comment on your posts" setting typically offers Everyone, Friends, or No One, and it governs every video unless a per-video setting overrides it. Setting it to No One is how you switch comments off account-wide in a single move.
Whether Everyone and Friends are both available to you depends on your account's privacy and its age. That age gating is not arbitrary. A majority of teens use TikTok, so 63% of teens use TikTok, a majority visit daily, and 16% report near-constant use (published July 10, 2025), which is why the platform narrows comment-audience options for younger accounts rather than leaving them wide open.
This is the most misunderstood step, so it gets the most room.
When the toggle will not move, or Everyone simply is not offered, it is almost always one of three things. Age gating: younger and under-16 accounts have narrowed comment-audience options, so choices that exist on an adult account are removed rather than merely switched off. Account-type defaults: business, creator, and newly converted accounts can carry different defaults than the personal account the same person used before. Regional restrictions: some options vary by market.
Learn to read which one you are looking at, because the symptom tells you the cause:
Be honest with yourself about one thing: this is TikTok platform policy, and it changes periodically. Exact age thresholds and the exact labels on these screens move, so confirm the current state in the live app rather than trusting any thresholds you read secondhand, including here. Part of TikTok's youth-safety architecture is that accounts belonging to those aged 13 to 15 are accounts set to private by default (published March 1, 2023), and those defaults feed straight into which comment-audience options an account is even shown.
The classic failure here: you change the account-level setting, save it, and the video still shows comments off. That is a per-video override still sitting on top of the account default. Account-level is the default, not the enforcer. A video that was individually set to no comments keeps that setting until you clear it on that specific video.
While you are in the comment settings, you will see more than an on/off switch.
You will find filter controls, keyword filters, Creator Care Mode (which filters offensive and unwanted comments pending your approval), and the option to hide rather than delete. These are worth noting now, not configuring now.
The point to hold onto: turning comments on and controlling what shows up are two different levers. Re-enabling comments does not mean everything now sits live and unmanaged. It means the door is open, and filtering decides what actually walks through it. If you want the full walkthrough on that, here is how to hide unwanted comments.
Here is the honest boundary.
Once comments are on across a brand's videos and its ads, the volume, the languages, the off-hours timing, and the speed of harmful or off-brand replies outrun what one or two people can triage by hand. Re-enabling comments without a moderation plan is not a neutral act. It leaves spam and harmful replies sitting live under brand content, in public, for however long it takes someone to notice.
The scale you are moderating inside is larger than it looks. TikTok itself removes a massive volume of content at the platform level, much of it through automated systems acting without human review. Platform enforcement catches a lot, but it does not moderate for your brand voice or your specific risk lines, and it does not answer the buyer question under your ad.
This is where a dedicated moderation layer like BrandBastion's Reputation+ applies: real-time monitoring across paid and organic, hide-not-delete, and brand-context sentiment that scores comments by their impact on the brand rather than their linguistic polarity, so sarcasm and competitor praise are read correctly. The AI does the volume work; human oversight keeps the judgment calls accurate, so nothing is acting unsupervised on the brand's behalf.
One distinction to settle before you decide what you need: hiding is not deleting. Hide-not-delete keeps a harmful comment off the public timeline while the original poster still sees it, which avoids the backlash a visible deletion invites and preserves an audit trail of what was actioned and why. Permanent removal is a separate call; if that is what a specific case calls for, here is the guide to deleting individual TikTok comments. When you are ready to move past manual triage, this is the TikTok comment moderation tool built for it.
Do this today, not this week.
Open the video currently pulling the most reach. Confirm comments are on at both the video and the account level, since one without the other will not hold. Then, before you leave the settings, decide two things: who can comment, and what gets filtered. Both, in the same sitting.
You will know it worked when a fresh test comment appears and stays visible, and when new comments are landing and being seen rather than piling up under a post nobody is watching.