TikTok on Wednesday announced that it would be bringing in new well-being features for kids, families, and its larger community.
The business is expanding Family Pairing with additional parental restrictions, introducing new default settings for teen users, and enhancing its screen time controls with more customized options.
Soon, a daily screen time limit of 60 minutes will be automatically applied to any account held by a user who is under the age of 18.
Teenagers will need to provide a passcode in order to continue scrolling after the allotted 60 minutes have passed.
The daily screen time cap will also be set at 60 minutes for TikTok users under the age of 13.
When the allotted screen time is up, a parent or guardian must set a passcode or enter an existing one to allow the child to watch for an additional 30 minutes.
In the event that teens disable the 60-minute default and use TikTok for more than 100 minutes in a day, the app will encourage them to set a daily screen time limit.
The company discovered that this strategy increased utilization of their screen time management tools by 234% in the first month of testing.
Every teen account on TikTok will also receive a weekly inbox message with a summary of their screen time.
The Family Pairing tool on TikTok, which enables parents to link their account to that of their teen to enable content and privacy settings, is also getting new capabilities.
More importantly, the business claimed that it is still in the early phases of developing a feature that would allow parents to block videos containing words or hashtags that they don’t want their teens to view.
To build this tool, TikTok is collaborating with parenting, youth, and civil society organizations.
The daily screen time limit for teens can now be customized by caregivers via Family Pairing, including the option to choose different time limits based on the day of the week.
Also, the company is integrating Family Pairing with its screen time dashboard.
Together with statistics on how frequently a teen opened the app, the dashboard shows how much time they spent using the app throughout the day and at night.
Moreover, TikTok is offering a new setting that lets parents schedule when their teens’ notifications are muted. It’s important to note that accounts of users 13 to 15 years old already stop receiving push notifications at 9 o’clock, while accounts of users 16 to 17 years old stop receiving push notifications at 10PM
“We’ll continue to invest in improving our current features as well as introducing new tools to help people stay in control as they express their creativity, make meaningful connections, and enjoy culture-defining entertainment,” the company said in a blog post.
According to a new study, TikTok is the social media platform that children and teenagers use most frequently during the day, even surpassing YouTube. TikTok’s success among children and teenagers makes its enhancement of well-being features for young users no surprise.