Social Media App, TikTok has shown solidarity in encouraging good internet citizenship with the introduction of new features which would limit the number of hours kids spend on their app.
TikTok users who are under 13, will also have their daily screen-time limit set to 60 minutes and to continue viewing for another extra 30 minutes, they would require a passcode which would be entered by a parent or guardian.
Although teens 13, and older users can ignore or opt out of the 60-minute settings, however, if the users disable the 60-minute screen time limit and spend more than 100 minutes on the app per day, they will be prompted by TikTok to set a daily screen time limit. TikTok will also send every teen account weekly inbox notifications of their screen time history on the app. TikTok released this new update “encourage teens to enable screen time management,” last year, Keenan disclosed, which showed, according to results, an increase in the use of the screen time tools by 234%.
Keenan said “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,”
TikTok is also adding three new parental control features which are; the ability of caregivers to use TikTok’s family Pairing feature to make changes to daily screen-time limits for teens, which may include choosing different time limits depending on the day of the week; a screen-time dashboard which shows a summary of the time spent on the app as well as several time TikTok was opened, and a breakdown of total time spent during the day and at night on the app; it also added a new setting which allows parents to set a schedule that mute the notifications from TikTok for their teen.
TikTok, disclosed that users account from age 13-15 do not receive push notifications from 9 p.m while users aged 16-17 do not receive push notifications from 10 p.m
Keenan also disclosed that “In addition to bringing these new features to Family Pairing, everyone will soon be able to set their own customized screen time limits for each day of the week and set a schedule to mute notifications,”. TikTok also is rolling out a sleep reminder feature to “help people more easily plan when they want to be offline at night.”.
Additional features included in TikTok’s existing safety settings for teens account include, user accounts from ages 13-15 being set to private by default while direct messaging is available for users aged 16 and above, with live streaming settings limited to users 18 and above.
These changes were made when TikTok which is owned by China’s Byte Dance received serious backlash from lawmakers in the U.S and other countries claiming the app posed a national security threat with Congress Bills already sponsored in the U.S which could grant President Biden authority to ban TikTok in the U.S under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday approved a bill that grants President Biden the authority to ban TikTok, the bill 21-16 votes from both parties of the house committee, where Republicans voted in favor and Democrats unanimously opposed the bill.
