Over the past few years, TikTok has grown to be the most popular social media platform for teens, driven by the short-form nature of the videos on the platform and an algorithm that will serve you a never-ending stream of content that will have you more often than not hooked.
For adults, this is not really a problem as you can spend your time in a way that pleases you, however, for teenagers, more oversight needs to be implemented and to this extent, TikTok is now introducing time limits for people under the age of 18.
Teenagers who hit a daily screen limit time of 60 minutes will be required to enter a passcode to continue watching. Entering the passcode is intended to make the users conscious of the decision they are making to go past the recommended time limit.
If a teenager does not wish to have a limit on how much time they spend on the app, they can remove the time limit entirely, however, upon clocking more than 100 minutes on the app in a single day, TikTok will prompt them to set up a new limit.
Furthermore, after each week, TikTok will send a message to the account of every teenager with a recap of how much time they spent on the app. The company explains that they consulted researchers from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital when deciding how long the time restrictions should be.
“While there’s no collectively-endorsed position on how much screen time is ‘too much’, or even the impact of screen time more broadly, we recognize that teens typically require extra support as they start to explore the online world independently,” said Cormac Keenan, Head of Trust and Safety at TikTok
The time limit also extends to children under the age of 13, but in this case, a parent or guardian will be the one required to enter the passcode for 30 minutes of additional viewing time.
In addition to the time limits, TikTok is introducing a few other changes including the ability of a parent to link their account to that of their kids in order to monitor their activity, the ability to filter out videos with words or hashtags they do not want their children to interact with and customizable time limits so that you can extend the time limits for your children during the weekends or holidays then shorten it during the week and when they are supposed to be in school.
