TikTok has announced new functionalities focused on the well-being of adolescents and families, among which is a system that will alert users under 18 years of age that they have reached 60 minutes of daily use, at which point they will have to enter a number in the application to continue using it.
The Chinese company is aware that its service is one of the most popular among the youngest. In fact, according to a recent Qustodio report, users between the ages of 4 and 18 spent an average of 96 minutes a day on this social network in 2022.
In its effort to offer digital experiences that contribute “fun and play a positive role in the way people express themselves, discover ideas and connect”, has introduced a series of new features to its screen time management tool.
This feature now has new custom options and settings for teen accounts, and with it, TikTok has expanded the Family Subchronization program with more parental controls.
With the aim of helping the youngest to manage their time on the platform, the platform will implement a notification system that will be activated once the hour of use of the service has been reached.
In this way, after 60 minutes of active screen, the platform will force users to enter a certain code to continue their activity in the application. As a result, young people will find themselves in need of make an active decision to prolong this time.
To develop this feature, TikTok has consulted current academic research and the opinion of experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital (United States).
One such study, conducted by Internet Matters.org, shows that being more aware of how time passes can help people be more intentional about the decisions they make.
Given this conclusion, TikTok has determined that it will send each adolescent a weekly notification to your inbox with a summary of your screen time.
On the other hand, the company has commented that it continues to innovate in the way of giving autonomy to families and has announced the integration of three new features in the Family Synchronization tool.
One of these is personalized daily screen time limits, which will allow guardians to use the Family Sync functionality to customize the daily screen time limit of adolescents.
The aforementioned screen time dashboard has also been incorporated into this functionality, providing summaries of the time in the app, the number of times TikTok was opened, and a breakdown of the total time spent during both the day and night.
On the other hand, the platform is implementing a new adjustment that allows parents set a specific time to mute notifications of their minor children. In this way, the accounts belonging to users between the ages of 13 and 15 no longer receive notifications after nine at night, while those of young people between the ages of 16 and 17 have them deactivated after 10 at night.
Likewise, TikTok has announced the launch of a sleep reminder, focused on helping users plan when they want to be offline at night.