Tiktok users often complain about wasting a lot of time on this platform, which is due to the unparalleled ability of this video application to distract users, provide entertainment and participate through its advanced recommendation technology. Since tiktok has become one of the most used applications among children, its addiction has become the subject of many psychological studies and parents' attention Tiktok today launched a new set of screen time features designed to give users better control over their use of tiktok
Among these new features, two new controls for monitoring and managing screen time usage and a new digital health guide are being added to the security center of the application.
Tiktok said that the guide is entitled "how can I reflect on my digital well-being with my family and friends?", It aims to help users "reflect more comprehensively" on how they spend their time online.
At the same time, the new screen time function is a supplement to the screen time control that tiktok has launched for families. These functions have been used worldwide for more than two years, including the method that parents set screen time limits for their children. These functions are also a supplement to the daily screen time limit tool added by tiktok in february2020, which is available to all users from the existing digital health part of the application.
Instead, today's new in app tools can help users control the time they spend on tiktok, allowing them to schedule screen breaks regularly.
This function aims to solve the problem of application addiction, which is not related to the total consumption, but related to the loss of tracking the time spent by users on tiktok each time the application is opened. In other words, it is a tool to manage screen time in each time period. With this new tool, users can ask the app to remind them to take a break after a certain time of their choice.
By default, it suggests 10 minutes, 20 minutes, or 30 minutes for rest reminders, but if users want to engage in a longer or shorter session before displaying notifications, they can set reminders for custom times. These default recommended break times are much less than the daily screen time limit recommended by existing tools. The latter requires the user to set a daily screen time limit of 40, 60, 90, or 120 minutes.
Tiktok pointed out that the tool can also be suspended or closed at any time, which will allow people to use the reminder function in the way they think appropriate. For example, users may not want to limit screen time at home on lazy weekends, but during the work week, when they want to go to bed early, they want to limit their tiktok time.
Related to this, tiktok is launching a new screen time dashboard, which will provide more information about the time spent by users on the application. It includes a summary of the time users spend on the application every day, the number of times they open the application, and the classification of day and night usage. Users can also choose to receive weekly notifications to remind them to view their dashboards.
Although the new screen time tool is being introduced to users of any age group in the world, tiktok said that it has also introduced new screen time prompts for minors aged 13 to 17. In the future, if minors use the app for more than 100 minutes in a day, tiktok will remind them of the new screen time limit tool the next time they open the app.
Such a function even needs to exist, which indicates that many parents are still too lazy to configure tiktok's existing parental control and let the company act as a digital parent.
Millennial and Gen X users -- today's parents -- may have grown up in the evolving world of technology, or spent most of their adult lives using technology, but surprisingly, many people still don't monitor their children's screen time and use of digital devices. A study by Kaspersky in 2021 found that only half of American parents are using the parental control app, and only 44% of parents supervise their children's use of devices. In other markets, the proportion of parental control may be lower. For example, a 2020/2021 Ofcom study showed that about six out of ten British parents knew about digital parental controls, but only about one third actually used them.
Before launching the new screen time function, the Wall Street Journal recently conducted a survey on the impact of tiktok on children's brains in April 2022. The report cites a widely reported scientific study on how the app's algorithms activate the brain's reward centers - including those related to addiction. Although the study focused on college students and young people rather than children, it found that about 5.9% of tiktok users may have "serious use problems".
The Wall Street Journal reported that young people are more difficult to manage their screen use time because their prefrontal cortex - for impulse control and decision-making - is not fully developed before the age of 25.
It can be said that tiktok's screen time tools, including those for underage children, are more powerful than those of rival platforms such as instagram and Youtube, because tiktok's control granularity is very fine. And they are far ahead of snapchat, which has not yet launched its own parental control feature. However, considering that there is now sufficient evidence that addictive social applications have an impact on health - especially on children's brains - it is expected that regulators will soon intervene to exercise more control over the market, so it is not up to application manufacturers to choose what tools to provide and how they should work.