So much for teens spending hours scrolling through 10-second videos: TikTok wants to limit how much time young people spend on TikTok each day. The social-media platform, whose parent is the Chinese-controlled ByteDance, says it will debut a new 60-minute daily screen-time limit for minors in the coming weeks, which is intended to “help teens manage their time on TikTok,” according to a company blog post on Wednesday. This change comes on the heels of several U.S. federal agencies joining international public entities in banning the app from government devices over security concerns.
See: U.S. and Canada are purging TikTok from government devices. India, Pakistan and Afghanistan took steps sooner. So here is what you need to know about TikTok’s new policy, and why the popular video-sharing app has drawn so much controversy.Who is impacted by TikTok’s new screen-time limit? The accounts of all TikTok users under 18 will be automatically set to the company’s new 60-minute daily limit in the coming weeks. “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,” TikTok’s head of trust and safety, Cormac Keenan, explained in the company blog post. “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.” Will this change happen automatically? Yes. The new policy, which will be rolled out “in the coming weeks,” …