• Every TikTok user below the age of 18 will soon be subject to a daily screen time restriction of 60 minutes.
• Teens who exceed this age limit must enter a passcode in order to continue watching.
• The parents will be able to schedule muting of app notifications on their children’s accounts.

TikTok has introduced a slew of new features aimed at reducing screen time and improving the well-being of its younger users.

According to The Verge, every TikTok user under the age of 18 will soon be subject to a daily screen time restriction of 60 minutes. Teens who exceed this age limit must enter a passcode in order to continue watching. Users can disable the feature entirely, but if they do so and use TikTok for more than 100 minutes every day, they will be prompted to set a new cap.

TikTok states that during the first month of its trial, these reminders increased the use of its screen time control features by 234%. Teens will also receive a weekly inbox message summarizing their screen time, allowing younger users to be aware of how much time they spend using the app and pushing them to consciously choose to exceed the recommended screen time.

TikTok claims it interviewed experts from the Digital Wellbeing Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital as well as recent academic research to determine how long the time limit should be.

“While there’s no collectively-endorsed position on how much screen time is ‘too much” or even the impact of screen time more broadly, we recognise that teens typically require extra support as they start to explore the online world independently,” TikTok‘s Chief of Trust and Safety, Cormac Keenan, issued a statement.

Youngsters under the age of 13 who use “TikTok for Younger Users” will likewise be limited to 60 minutes. If the screen time limit is exceeded in this situation, a parent or guardian must set and input an existing passcode to allow 30 minutes of additional watch time on the account.

Four new features are also being introduced to TikTok’s Family Pairing, which allows a parent or guardian to link their TikTok account to a younger user’s account. Custom restrictions allow constraints to be altered based on the day of the week (or more widely extended over school holidays).

TikTok‘s screen time dashboard, which indicates how much time a child has spent using the app, how frequently it was opened, and a breakdown of how much time was spent during the day and night, is also accessible to family pairing users. With a new “Mute Notifications” setting, parents will soon be able to schedule the muting of app notifications on their children’s accounts. Those aged 13 to 15 already have push notifications muted automatically at 9 p.m., while those aged 16 to 17 have push notifications turned off at 10 p.m.

Finally, TikTok claims to be working on new content filters that would allow parents to filter out videos that contain terms or hashtags that they do not want their children to see. For the coming weeks, the company will collaborate with “parents, youth, and civil society organizations” to build the feature.

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TikTok also revealed that, in addition to family pairing, some of these settings will be made available to all users “soon,” allowing any user to schedule muted notifications and set distinct screen time limits for each day of the week. The new sleep reminder function allows users to specify a time when they want to be reminded to close the app and go to bed.

TikTok has not given a specific release date for the new functionalities.