TikTok Plans New Parental Controls – Knowligent
TikTok Plans New Parental Controls

TikTok Plans New Parental Controls

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TikTok, the popular social and viral video app, announced on the UK news page that it would give parents the ability to better manage their children's experience with the app.

The new Family Safety Mode links a parent’s TikTok account to their child’s, allowing the parent to then manage features that were previously standalone Digital Wellbeing features. You can set how much time your teen can spend on the app, who can send direct messages (or who can do so at all), and even restrict certain types of content that appears on your kids’ screens through the app.

This isn’t a new focus for TikTok, as they’ve previously partnered with popular TikTok creators to create videos that appear directly in users’ feeds, encouraging them to take breaks and manage their own screen time. However, this is the first attempt to let parents manage those features from within their own accounts.

It’s likely the company isn’t doing this as part of its own moral code. As TechCrunch notes, the FTC fined TikTok’s parent company (ByteDance) in 2019 for its predecessor app Musical.ly, which violated the US Children’s Privacy Act. TikTok itself is under investigation in the UK for potential GDPR violations regarding children’s data protection.