In a bid to stop children spending inordinate amounts of time scrolling on their phones, TikTok announced on Wednesday that all users on its platform registered as under 18 will be limited to one hour a day. When the hour’s up, users will have to enter a passcode to keep using the app, thereby forcing them to make a conscious decision to continue their time on the social media platform. But the issue with the new default setting—which is set to launch in “the coming weeks”—is that TikTok does not require a user to prove their age, meaning that teens can simply register themselves as being over 18. And kids will also have the option of simply switching the new default setting off, although the app will then prompt them to set their own time limit if they spend over 100 minutes on the app in a day. “This builds on a prompt we rolled out last year to encourage teens to enable screen time management,” Cormac Keenan, TikTok’s head of trust and safety, said in a statement, adding that TikTok’s “tests found this approach helped increase the use of our screen time tools by 234 percent.” The Chinese-owned platform will also send teen users a “weekly inbox notification with a recap of their screen time.”
