TikTok Now Offers New Features for Teens and Families
TikTok announces
new features for teens, families, and our broader community. We believe digital
experiences should bring joy and play a positive role in how people express
themselves, discover ideas, and connect. We're improving our screen time tool
with more custom options, introducing new default settings for teen accounts,
and expanding Family Pairing with more parental controls.
Changes to help teens manage their time on TikTok
In the coming
weeks, every account belonging to a user below age 18 will automatically be set
to a 60-minute daily screen time limit. 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.
These features add
to our robust existing safety settings for teen accounts. For instance, those
aged 13-15 have their accounts set to private by default, enabling teens to make
informed choices about what they choose to share, when, and with whom. Direct
messaging is only available to those age 16 and older and to host a LIVE,
community members must be at least 18.
Helping families have conversations about digital
well-being
When teens need
support, parents or caregivers are often the first people they can turn to,
making them one of our most important partners. As we continue to innovate on
how we empower families, we're adding three new features to Family Pairing:
- Custom daily screen time limits: Caregivers will be able to use Family Pairing to customize 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.
- Screen time dashboard: We're bringing our screen time dashboard to Family Pairing, which provides summaries of time on the app, the number of times TikTok was opened, and a breakdown of total time spent during the day and night. From our recent research, we know screen time is one of the topics parents most frequently discuss with their teens, and we want to support caregivers with relevant information to help them guide their teens.
- Mute notifications: Notifications help us stay connected, but there are times when it's important to be uninterrupted. We're introducing a new setting that enables parents to set a schedule to mute notifications 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.
Every
teen is different, and so is every family. That's why we remain focused on
reaching parents with the information they need about TikTok. We do this
through partnerships with creators, industry experts, and
advertising campaigns focused on safety features. We'll also
continue to surface Family Pairing information to some of our users in-app to
help them understand the options that may be useful to them or someone they
know. We hope these features will continue to help families establish an
ongoing dialogue about safety and well-being in our digital world.
New screen time controls for everyone
We want our
community to feel in control of their TikTok experience. 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. In addition, we're rolling out a sleep reminder
to help people more easily plan when they want to be offline at night. People
can set a time, and when it's reached, a pop-up will remind them it's time to
log off.
We'll continue to
invest in improving our current features as well as introducing new tools to
help people stay in control as they express their creativity, make meaningful
connections, and enjoy culture-defining entertainment.
Post a Comment