Ruby McMahon and Eve Slemp of East Lyme, Conn. Ms. McMahon went “TikTok sober” about a year ago, while Miss Slemp is a regular user of the app. Photo / Joe Buglewicz, The New York Times
At the end of 2021, Ruby McMahon and some of her high school classmates decided to go “TikTok sober.” McMahon had gotten hooked on TikTok during the Covid-19 pandemic and regularly spent five hours a day on the app.
“For a long time, I would do one assignment and then I would reward myself with a TikTok but then that TikTok would turn into 30,” said McMahon, a 17-year-old senior at East Lyme High School in Connecticut who has not returned to the app since she made the pact with friends.
“It kind of affected my mental health,” she added. “I was having a hard time sleeping when I was watching this many TikToks at night, but I couldn’t go to sleep without watching my TikToks first.”
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is in Washington’s cross hairs over concerns that it could be used to give Beijing access to data about American users, such as their approximate location and browsing history. TikTok’s CEO, Shou Chew, is expected to get many questions about that Thursday (Friday NZ time), when he testifies before Congress for the first time.
But Chew is also likely to come under fire from lawmakers about the app’s effects on the well-being of young people. It is used by two-thirds of American teenagers, and health and child technology experts have said that TikTok appears to be promoting addictive content and recommending dangerous challenges and potentially toxic or harmful videos. TikTok says it has 150 million U.S. users; Sensor Tower, a market intelligence company, says users spend an average of 93 minutes a day on the app.
This month, the company announced a new 60-minute “daily screen time limit” for every account registered to a user younger than 18. Chew hailed the new restriction in prepared remarks released Tuesday before his congressional testimony. He pointed to the limit as one of the “numerous steps to help ensure that teens under 18 have a safe and enjoyable experience on the app.” Ahead of the hearing, TikTok has advertised its privacy and safety tools, with a focus on how it helps families, in places such as Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Politico’s Playbook newsletter.
But numerous teenage TikTok users, educators and youth experts expressed skepticism about the effort and its framing.
Under the new limits, which has not yet been released to all users, 13- to 17-year-olds on the app will simply be asked to enter their own pass code to keep watching videos after 60 minutes have passed. For users who say they are 12 or younger, parents can be in charge of their pass code and add 30 minutes of watch time at the 60-minute mark.
Joe Clement, a high school teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia, who co-wrote a book called “Screen Schooled” in 2017, about the overuse of technology in classrooms, said that “it’s not really a limit, it’s a suggestion.” When he talked to his students about the prompts, they said that they would “blow right by that.”
Daria, a 13-year-old in New York City, said that after long stretches on TikTok, the app has served her videos asking her to, say, consider going for a walk.
“I watch the videos sometimes because they’re funny,” she said, “but I think there are probably better ways that TikTok could be helping to limit time usage, like if they made videos more boring after an hour.”
Brian Parker, a software engineer in Portland, Oregon, has typically given his 14-year-old daughter three hours of TikTok screen time every day. (Apple and Google have tools for parents to limit screen time on their devices.) When he asked her if she came across any of the 60-minute prompts, she admitted that she was pretending that she was 21 on the app and so wouldn’t receive those — which was news to him.
“I think that’s pretty common for all these kids; they’ve somehow learned through trial and error that they don’t want to be their actual age because there will be limitations involved with that,” Parker said.
Tracy Elizabeth, TikTok’s head of family safety and developmental health, said that even though teenagers could still watch the app after entering a pass code, research showed that pausing to do that could cause them to do something else.
“That pause where they need to proactively think about what they’re doing and make a choice if they’d like to continue using the app, that’s the part that’s really important,” she said. TikTok doesn’t yet have data on how the prompts are changing how teens use the app.
TikTok worked with the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital for advice and research in selecting its 60-minute prompts. The lab’s funders include a mix of media, health care and technology companies, including TikTok and Meta.
Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician and director of the lab, acknowledged that TikTok’s new rules weren’t technically limits. “Really, what our input to them seems to have done is put some speed bumps in place,” he said.
Some critics of TikTok have noted that the limits are much less strict than those built into Douyin, the Chinese version of the app. Douyin has a 40-minute time limit, after which it is inaccessible for its users younger than 14, and it can’t be used overnight. TikTok has said the two apps are run by separate teams for separate markets.
Rich said that he was intrigued by Douyin’s approach.
“One of the interesting debates going on among lawmakers is that China is well aware of the influence of the digital space on kids,” he said, “and they are consciously trying to create a digital ecosystem that helps them be smarter and healthier and more in solidarity with each other.”
Clement, the teacher in Virginia, said that he wanted to see a stronger response from TikTok.
“If this move by TikTok was sincere and they were really interested in helping kids, they would make the service unavailable during the school day — especially for users under 18,” he said. “There’s absolutely no reason an under-18 kid needs TikTok during school.”
Eve Slemp, a 17-year-old senior at East Lyme High School in Connecticut, is an avid TikTok user. She limits her time on the app to less than an hour per day during the week and two to three hours per day on weekends.
She recently discovered settings on the app that showed her that she was opening TikTok 90 times in a single day. She’s on top of TikTok slang like “Am I the drama?” and watches #dayinmylife videos starring workers from Google and Instagram for career inspiration.
Lillie Pittman, a 16-year-old junior at Midlothian High School in Virginia, has been using TikTok since it was known as Musical.ly in 2018, spending two hours on the app every day. It’s a core part of her social life and the culture at her high school.
“Me and my really, really close friends probably send over I want to say 50 to 60 TikToks per day and then altogether I probably get 100,” she said.
Slemp, the senior in Connecticut, said TikTok “would get a lot of backlash” from teenagers if it set a real hard limit.
“They are for sure setting this time limit to make themselves seem like they care about teen mental health — like, ‘We’re making an effort to prevent them from staying on too long,’” she said. “But they’re smart, they know if they actually do that, they’re not going to be as popular.”
Written by: Sapna Maheshwari
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