Coinciding with the World Adolescent Mental Wellness DayTikTok announced yesterday the implementation of new features with the aim of promoting the well-being of adolescents and their families.
The platform is, to this day, the most used among those under 18 years of age, with an average time of 107 minutes a day, according to the report. From Alpha to Z: raising the digital generations de Qustodio, the leading family security company. Being the preferred social network for the little ones in 2022 and taking into account that, according to the study, screen time and the use of mobile devices cause discussions in half of the households surveyed, the platform wanted to put remedy and contribute to improving well-being between young people and parents. Thus, all user accounts under the age of 18 will automatically have a limit of 60 minutes per day on the screen.
TikTok share the investigation conducted by the Internetmatters.org platform, and supported by the same social network, to justify their decision. According to the study, “lack of control over screen time is not just a problem for teens; parents also acknowledged that they felt they were using their phones too much.” Research confirms that the majority of adolescents wanted to take responsibility for their time online without the help of their parents and that it is common for young people to feel a lack of control over their online behaviors and habits.
One more step towards digital well-being among young people
The social network itself acknowledges that, despite there not being a clear consensus on how long is “adequate”, this connection limit has been defined following consulting different academic investigations and asking experts from the Digital Wellness Lab from Boston Children’s Hospital. With the implementation of this measure, teens will be required to enter an access code to continue consuming content when they reach the set time limit of one hour.
From the social network they confirm that this functionality “will force [a los adolescentes] to make an active decision to prolong that time [de visualización]”, although users can disable it. If they do so and spend more than 100 minutes in the app, Cormac Keenan, TikTok’s director of trust and safety, explains that the user will be asked to set a custom daily screen time limit. In addition, the measure builds on another that was launched last year to encourage adolescents to manage their time in front of the screen and that reaped great results. “According to the conclusions, this approach contributed to a 234% increase in the use of screen time control tools,” they declare from the social network.
In this way, the new functionality is added to many others promoted by TikTok to ensure safe use of the platform among the youngest. The social network cites among the measures the default private accounts of adolescents between 13 and 15 years of age, direct messages available only to those over 16 years of age and live videos only available to those who are at least 18 years of age. “We’re improving our Screen Time management tool with more personalized options, introducing new default settings for teen accounts, and expanding the Family Sync program with more parental controls,” Keenan said.
In this sense, TikTok’s security and trust director shares a battery of updates related to the Family Synchronization system, which allows parents or caregivers to link their TikTok account with that of their teenage son or daughter and establish controls. Parents will be able to mute notifications at certain times, receive summaries of app usage time, the number of times TikTok was opened, and a breakdown of total time spent during the day and night, and set custom time limits. .