TikTok announced that it is rolling out a 60-minute daily screen time limit for teens so as to help them manage time spent on the app. This is one of the features for teens and families on TikTok it is introducing.
The short-form video hosting service announced that in the coming weeks, every account belonging to a user below age 18 will automatically be set to a 60-minute daily screen time limit. The company stated that it consulted the current academic research and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital in choosing this limit.
When the 60-minute time limit is up, teenagers will receive a prompt that asks them to enter a passcode to keep watching. This means they have to actively decide to prolong their viewing time. For children under 13, they will also have a daily screen time limit of 60 minutes. They will however require a parent or guardian will need to set or enter a passcode to access an additional 30 minutes of viewing time.
According to Cormac Keenan, Head of Trust and Safety, TikTok in a blog post,
“Research also shows that being more aware of how we spend our time can help us be more intentional about the decisions we make. So we’re also prompting teens to set a daily screen time limit if they opt out of the 60-minute default and spend more than 100 minutes on TikTok in a day. This builds on a prompt we rolled out last year to encourage teens to enable screen time management; our tests found this helped increase the use of our screen time tools by 234%. In addition, we’ll send every teen account a weekly inbox notification with a recap of their screen time.”
Apart from the above, the company also announced three new features to Family Pairing:
- Custom daily screen time limits: Caregivers will have the ability to personalize the daily screen time limit for their teenagers, which includes the option to select various time limits based on the day of the week. This feature provides families with more flexibility to align screen time with school schedules, holiday breaks, or family trips.
- Screen time dashboard: TikTok is bringing its screen time dashboard to Family Pairing, which provides summaries of time on the app, the number of times TikTok was opened, and a breakdown of total time spent during the day and night. According to its recent research, screen time is one of the topics parents most frequently discuss with their teens, and this will support caregivers with relevant information to help them guide their teens.
- Mute notifications: TikTok is introducing a new setting that enables parents to set a schedule to mute notifications for their teen. Accounts aged 13-15 already do not receive push notifications from 9pm and accounts aged 16-17 have push notifications disabled from 10pm.
In January this year TikTok said it was testing a “sleep reminders” feature to help manage screen time for users. It is now rolling out this feature to help people more easily plan when they want to be offline at night. People can set a time, and when it’s reached, a pop-up will remind them it’s time to log off.
