TIKTOK INTRODUCES NEW FEATURE THAT LINKS PARENTS ACCOUNTS TO THEIR TEEN’S

TikTok has announced a new way parents and caregivers can support their teens viewing experience through Family Pairing, which allows parents and teens to customise their safety settings based on individual needs. 

Parents can customise the topics their teen may prefer not to stumble upon to help reduce the likelihood of their teens viewing content they may uniquely find jarring. Family Pairing, which will be rolling out over the coming weeks, will allow a parent to link their TikTok account to their teen’s and set controls including:

Screen Time Management: Control how long your teen can spend on TikTok each day. In addition, TikTok has partnered with top creators to make short videos that appear right in the app and encourage users to keep tabs on their screen time.

Restricted Mode: Limit the appearance of content that may not be appropriate for all audiences. Even without Family Pairing enabled, parents can help their teen set Screen Time Management and Restricted Mode by visiting the app’s Digital Wellbeing controls at any time.

Direct Messages: Restrict who can send messages to the connected account, or turn off direct messaging completely automatically disabling direct messages for registered accounts under the age of 16.

Last year the company launched a content filtering tool to allow people to filter out videos with words or hashtags they’d prefer to avoid seeing in their For You or following feeds. In March, TikTok set teen’s daily screen time to 60 minutes by default, with almost three-quarters of teens choosing to keep the limit.