Status: 03/01/2023 6:20 p.m
After one hour a day, it should be the end for minors on TikTok in the future. If you then want to watch more videos on the app, you need a password. Parents have even more options for controlling their children’s usage behavior.
The Chinese short video platform Tiktok wants to help underage users to better control the screen time they spend on the app. The company said daily screen time will be rolled out by default in the coming weeks. Accounts of users under the age of 18 would then automatically have a time limit of one hour per day.
Tiktok’s head of trust and safety, Cormac Keenan, wrote in a blog post that underage users would have to make an active decision to continue using the app after they reached the 60-minute limit. If you lift the daily limit and are active on TikTok for more than 100 minutes a day, the app will ask you to set a time limit in the future.
If users are under 13 years old, a parent or legal guardian must even enter a code to enable 30 minutes of additional viewing time. In addition, parents would now also be able to set individual time limits for their children’s TikTok usage based on the day of the week.
Tiktok said the 60-minute limit was set after consulting academic research and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Usage limitation is similar to Chinese model
The future default is similar to how underage online activity is handled in China, where TikTok parent ByteDance is based. In 2021, the authorities decided that children could only play online games for one hour a day and only on Fridays, weekends and public holidays. This is to counteract internet addiction.
TikTok also announced that it wants to develop a program that parents can use to prevent their children from seeing content with certain words or hashtags.
TikTok is particularly popular with children and young people. Several governments have recently raised concerns about the security of the platform and its ability to give certain posts greater visibility.