TikTok has announced new features for teens, families, and the broader community, by improving the screen time tools with more custom options, introducing new default settings for teen accounts and expanding Family Pairing with more parental controls.
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. TikTok consulted the current academic research and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital to choose a limit.
If the 60-minute limit is reached, teens will be prompted to enter a passcode in order to continue watching, requiring them to make an active decision to extend that time.
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Additionally, TikTok is 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 TikTok rolled out last year to encourage teens to enable screen time management.
These features add to TikTok’s existing safety settings for teen accounts. For instance, those aged 13-15 have their accounts set to private by default, enabling teens to make informed choices about what they choose to share, when, and with whom. Direct messaging is only available to those age 16 and older, and to host a LIVE, community members must be at least 18.
TikTok is also adding three new features to Family Pairing:
• Custom daily screen time limits: Caregivers will be able to use Family Pairing to customize the daily screen time limit for their teen – including choosing different time limits depending on the day of the week – giving families more choices to match screen time to school schedules, holiday breaks, or family travel.
• Screen time dashboard: TikTok is bringing the 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.
• 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.