TikTok has announced new features for teens, families and the broader community.
Everyone will soon be able to set their own customised screen time limits for each day of the week and set a schedule to mute notifications.
A new setting enables parents to set a schedule 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.
Caregivers will be able to use Family Pairing to customise 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.
"We believe digital experiences should bring joy and play a positive role in how people express themselves, discover ideas, and connect," says Cormac Keenan, head of trust & safety, TikTok.
"We're improving our screen time tools with more custom options, introducing new default settings for teen accounts, and expanding Family Pairing with more parental controls."
Accounts belonging to a user below age 18 will automatically be set to a 60-minute daily screen time limit.
Keenan: "While there's no collectively-endorsed position on the 'right' amount of screen time or even the impact of screen time more broadly, we consulted the current academic research and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital in choosing this 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.
"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 approach 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."
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