TikTok Admits It’s as Clueless on Teens as the Rest of Us

Users under 18 years old on TikTok will soon face a hurdle on their way to averaging nearly two hours per day in the popular video app, the company announced Wednesday. But the hurdle is a low one, so low as to barely deserve the name. 

In the coming weeks, underage users’ accounts will automatically opt into TikTok’s new 60-minute screen time limit. At the one-hour mark, they’ll be served a prompt to stop using the app—unless, of course, they don’t want to stop, in which case they can re-enter their password and keep right on watching. 

And if that’s too much of an inconvenience, as more dedicated teenage TikTokers might well decide, they can opt out of the limit entirely and ignore the subsequent suggestion, delivered to those who pass the 100-minute mark in a day, to set a screen time limit of their own choosing. Other pieces of TikTok’s announcement run along similar lines: Lots of well-meaning nudges, lots of if you want to‘s, lots of ways to opt out and continue exactly as you were.

For all their practical impotence, however, TikTok’s changes are exemplary of the present state of America’s kids-and-phones debate in two key senses: First, that a major tech company is even making a show of self-regulating like this—complete with a tacit admission that unlimited screen time is bad, especially for children—is indicative of where research results and public opinion are trending. And second, all the large-scale ideas for regulation in this space are toothless, terrible, or both.

It wasn’t always obvious that we’d come to the current consensus on smartphones and the social media they make perpetually available to us. Think back to the 2008 presidential election, for instance. Then-candidate Barack Obama’s team was using Facebook as no campaign had before. People were posting weird fan videos for Ron Paul on YouTube. It was exciting! It felt like real engagement, real access. There was a broad sense of optimism that massively increasing our intake of information and communication with one other was a good thing. It would make us better-informed citizens more capable of holding power to account.

A decade and a half later, what can you do but laugh at the naiveté of digital youth? Recent years—and the last two weeks in particular—have seen a rapid convergence, spanning much of the political spectrum, on the conclusion that the technological and information environment we’ve made has serious downsides for politics, mental health, and more. 

That’s not to say there are no benefits of smartphones and social media. Obviously, they have advantages, and I myself use both. But it turns out spending one’s life, from age 2 onward, with a screen affixed to one hand is actually not fun, not healthy, and not terribly conducive to rational thought, good citizenship, or enjoying time with friends and family in real life.