Digital well-being is a matter of grave concern. Short-length content often tends to encourage unconscious, vague, and long-hour scrolling and watching patterns. These forms of media facilitate fast interaction and a user stays negligent about being unable to slow down or pause until exhaustion sets in. A similar usage pattern followed by users has been observed on TikTok, the platform that introduced such a format. In spite of the fact that this has been profitable for the company only, with the move that TikTok rolls out new screen time controls, it seems that they made a decision that deserves actual appreciation.
As reported in the TikTok Newsroom, TikTok is debuting its well-being feature for teens, families, and its broader community. Besides giving users more custom options, this feature expands to Family Pairing with enhanced controls for parents and introduces teen accounts to default settings. The motto behind the initiative seeks to allot families and individual users the power to limit and manage their own screen time and be aware of the time they spend scrolling media content on the app. With this new feature, TikTok is taking a proactive step towards promoting a healthier digital lifestyle for its users.
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A daily cap on the screen time limit of 60 minutes will be automatically imposed on users under the age of 18. Once the daily limit is reached, the teen user will be asked to enter a passcode to continue scrolling. This is also the same for users under 13 years of age under “TikTok for Younger Users”. However, for the under 13 users, once the screen time limit exhausts, a parent or guardian will need to set or enter an existing passcode that would enable them for an additional 30 minutes of viewing time.
Users who spend more than 100 minutes per day on TikTok will be prompted to set a daily limit. Additionally, TikTok will send every teen account a weekly inbox notification with a recap of their week’s screen time. But is this really going to turn effective? The company did its first month of testing this and found an uplift of 234% in its screen time management tools.
In the Family Pairing tool, parents will now be able to link their accounts to their teens to enable content and privacy settings. Although it is still in the early stages of the process, parents will soon be able to filter videos with words and hashtags they do not want their teens to watch. The company is striving to collaborate with parenting, youth, and civil society organizations in the development of this feature.
It does not end here. Caregivers can now use Family Pairing to set daily screen time limits for teen users in their family and additionally, different time limits for different days of the week. Consequently, weekend watch time can be the most enjoyable, whereas the rest can do with less. All of this information such as the amount of time spent by the teen on the app during the day and at night, the number of times the app has been opened throughout the day, and more, will be visible on a screen time dashboard for Family Pairing.
A supplementary setting has also been introduced that allows parents to default to a schedule to mute notifications for their teens. Previously, accounts of users aged 13-15 would not receive push notifications from 9 pm onwards, and those for users aged 16-17 were disabled from 10 pm.
Targeting its broader community, TikTok is committed to empowering its users to take complete control of their experience. Everyone will be able to customize screen time limits for each day of the week and also schedule the same mute notifications feature. They are also rolling out a sleep reminder for users, so they can get the rest they need instead of watching funny and unfunny content on their platform.
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TikTok has already been scrutinized in the past regarding its impact on young users and how it diverts the time of users towards it by pushing relevant content to the user that one likes to watch. It is true that nearly every social media engagement and video-sharing platform does that, but the trend that started with TikTok led to its popularity around the world more than any other. On the contrary, in an effort to resolve the issue, TikTok rolls out new screen time controls. Let us know your opinion of the company’s move in the comments box below.
Source: TikTok Newsroom
