TikTok is a hit among young people, who have fun watching one of the millions of short videos that circulate on the platform. And the Spanish spend hours diving into its content. Exactly 96 minutes a day, more time than on any other social network, according to Qustodio’s annual study From Alpha to Zeta, educating digital generations.
Young people spend too much time in front of the screens, acknowledges even TikTok, which has just announced new features 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. Same limit for children under 13: one hour a day.
“While there is no collectively supported position on the ‘right’ amount of screen time or even the impact of screen time in general, we consulted current academic research and experts at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital in choosing this limit. . If the 60-minute limit is reached, teens will be asked to enter a passcode to continue watching,” explains TikTok’s head of trust and safety, Cormac Keenan.
If any of these users wants the additional thirty minutes, they will have to go to the father, mother or guardian, who must enable them for this additional viewing time. It will also send each teen a weekly notification with a summary of her screen time. In addition, it has announced the integration of three new features in the Family Synchronization tool.
The announcement of these new features coincides with a delicate moment for TiktTok, when institutions and governments put the platform in the crosshairs for security. The European Union (EU) has decided to ban the Chinese application on the corporate phones of its workers and MEPs, in addition to recommending that it not be installed on personal devices, in view of “cybersecurity concerns.”
Community institutions thus follow the American example. On February 28, the White House announced that it was giving US federal agencies thirty days to remove TikTok from all government electronic devices.