TikTok is set to introduce a 60-minute daily timer for all under 18s in a bid to reduce the amount of time teens spend scrolling through the video platform.
TikTok was initially released in 2016, but it came into its own in 2020 as people looked for forms of entertainment during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A lot of us will hold our hands up and say we have sunk many hours into the app because scrolling can feel like five minutes but really three hours have passed.
It's fairly easy to procrastinate from important work while scrolling on the app, and that includes kids avoiding school work, which appears to have been picked up by the developers.
There's constant debate nowadays about whether teenagers spend too much time inside staring at screens instead of being outside, and this new limit from TikTok may have an impact on that.
In a recent announcement, TikTok has decided that all accounts registered to those under the age of 18 will be limited to an hour a day, with a passcode needed to add on more time.
The developers said on their website: "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."
The website continued: "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. For people in our under 13 experience, the daily screen time limit will also be set to 60 minutes, and a parent or guardian will need to set or enter an existing passcode to enable 30 minutes of additional watch time."
This comes after the social media platform consulted experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital about what they feel the limit should be.
The platform added: "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."
TikTok will now let parents and caregivers set custom limits on screen time for anybody under the age of 18, and adults will be given a new dashboard where they can track their children's usage of the app.
All of these features will be available as developers roll out Family Pairing on the app, with a view to encouraging kids to spend less time on the platform.
Bad news for anybody over the age of 18, it will still require willpower to step away from the mindless scrolling!
