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TikTok Expands Teen Safety Features with New Parental Controls and Digital Wellbeing Tools

Guest post by : Adam Presser, Head of Operations & Trust and Safety, TikTok

Every day, teens around the world express their creativity, connect with friends, and learn on TikTok. We build the strongest safeguards into teen accounts by default to help ensure young people have positive experiences on our app — and to give parents peace of mind. We see this with the success of #LearnOnTikTok which is igniting new interests in everything from local geology to ancient history. And since launching a feed dedicated to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), millions of teens use it every week. Today, we’re expanding our family features to provide parents with more options for tailoring their teens’ account. We’re also introducing a feature to help teens build balanced digital habits.
Simple supervision tools for families
Since launching Family Pairing – TikTok’s parenting controls – five years ago, we’ve continually added new features based on feedback from families, as well as guidance from leading experts. Today, we’re enhancing Family Pairing by launching a way for parents to block their teens from being on TikTok during times that they control. No teen or family is the same, and whether it’s during family time, school, at night, or a weekend away, caregivers can use our new Time Away feature to decide when it’s best for their teens to take a break. Parents can also set a reoccurring schedule to best suit their family life. If plans change, teens can request extra time, but parents make the final decision.
We’re also adding a Family Pairing feature that can allow parents to see who their teen is following on TikTok, and who follows them, along with accounts their teen has blocked. With increased visibility into their teen’s network, parents will be better equipped to have ongoing conversations and help their teens develop the digital literacy skills they need.
We also hear that parents want to know more about the content their teens engage with on our app. In response, in the coming months, when a teen reports a video they think may be against TikTok’s rules, they can choose to alert a parent, caregiver, or other trusted adult at the same time, even if they aren’t using Family Pairing.
With these latest updates, parents can now view or adjust more than 15 safety, well-being, and privacy features. This includes:

Re-enabling our feed dedicated to STEM, if their teen has turned it off. This is now available in more than 100 countries and is enjoyed by millions of teens every week.

Setting customisable daily screen time limits. For example, parents could choose to limit their teens to 30 minutes on TikTok during the week but a little longer on a weekend. Once a parent-set limit has been reached, a teen can only use TikTok if their parent shares a unique passcode. Even if a parent doesn’t customize their teen’s settings, everyone under 18 has a 60 minute daily screen time limit by default.

Switching their teen’s account back to the default private setting, if their teen has made it public.

Helping teens learn balanced digital habits
We’re also announcing a new way to encourage young people to switch off at night. If a teen under 16 is on TikTok after 10pm, their For You feed will be interrupted with our new wind down feature. At launch, this is a full-screen takeover with calming music to help teens relax and be mindful of the time. If a teen decides to spend additional time on TikTok after the first reminder, we show a second, harder to dismiss, full-screen prompt. As before, we deliberately do not send push notifications to teens at night, which cannot be changed.
We designed these features to reflect best practices in behavioural change theory by providing positive nudges that can help teens develop balanced long-term habits. In countries where this has already been piloted, the vast majority of teens decide to keep this reminder on. In the coming weeks, we’ll also test adding meditation exercises to the wind down reminder, as research shows that mindful meditation can improve sleep quality.
As with any new feature, we look forward to hearing feedback from our community, and to inform our future plans, we’re conducting research with parents and teens around the world to understand how else we can help with the development of balanced habits.
Partnering with industry and civil society to build consensus on age assurance
Age assurance is one of the most complex areas that online platforms, policymakers and regulators are grappling with. We continue to enforce our age rules and add additional ways to confirm the age of people who use our platform. As part of our enforcement, we continue to use technology, like machine learning, to prevent people under 13 from being on our platform and make sure that teenagers are in the right age appropriate experience.
In addition, we’re partnering with Telefónica to understand how people can use age information from their phone provider to confirm their age. TikTok also supports the Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue on Age Assurance, an initiative convened by the Centre for Information Policy Leadership and the WeProtect Global Alliance, that brings together online platforms, regulators, policymakers, privacy and child rights organisations to discuss industry-wide approaches to age assurance.
See more stories here.
Ronan Leonard

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Published by
Ronan Leonard
11 months ago

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