If you're the parent of a teen, you might have noticed that TikTok just announced new parental-control safety measures—including a meditative shut-down prompt that teens will face if they're scrolling past 10 p.m., as well as a way for the adult in charge to block their kid from the app during set times.
That was on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, a digital safety expert and mom to a 16-year-old demonstrated on social media just how easy it would be for a savvy (and even not-so-savvy) teen to bypass.
"I can't believe that all the smart people working at TikTok think that the general population of parents will, A, accept this; B, use this; C, find this meaningful in any way, shape, or form," Titania Jordan, chief parent officer at online safety company Bark Technologies and author of a brand-new book about raising kids in the digital age, Parental Control, posted in the caption of an Instagram reel. "Seriously, what are they thinking?"
The new parental-control features are designed to work within an existing Family Pairing safety framework, through which parents link their account with their child's to better monitor and control their use of the app. Some experts have already weighed in on the features with Fortune, with Jill Murphy of Common Sense Media calling them "a step in the right direction" while emphasizing they are not the only answer. "In general," she said, "parental controls are just not a set-it-and-forget-it solution.”
Jordan, meanwhile, begins her new reel by declaring, "TikTok must think that every parent is just a complete idiot." She goes on to explain how a Google alert about the new safety features piqued her interest on Tuesday, prompting her to examine the details.
"I read it over, it seemed super fluffy, especially the meditation part," she said. "Like, no, you're not going to get kids to meditate within Tiktok—especially if you've curated an addictive algorithm of things they are most interested in!"
What she really wanted to investigate, though, was the new family pairing feature that "supposedly" gave parents more tools, such as controlling kids' time spent on the app. Jordan demonstrated how, to test it, she created the new TikTok account of a fictitious 15-year-old and then had that account follow her real adult account. She then linked her adult account to the fake teen account through the new pairing feature.
"I was really hoping that TikTok finally did something right. They did not," she said, reporting that, within a few taps, the 15-year-old account was able to unlink the account that the parent, a.k.a. Jordan, had just linked. "No warning, no blocker, no 'Hey, you need a PIN code password to make this happen.' No permission needed."
A TikTok spokesperson, though, raised many objections to the author's criticisms for Fortune, including:
- If a teen chooses to unlink, TikTok sends prominent notifications to the parent account— including a push notification and an inbox notification. Further, it locks the settings for 48 hours, "which enables parents to have a conversation with their teens."
- TikTok created the meditation feature because "research shows that mindful meditation can improve sleep quality," and that teens, specifically, saw a decrease in anxiety and rumination when exposed to a meditation app.
- The Family Pairing feature allows extensive parental controls, such as the abilities to: set a teen's account to private or public; restrict who can comment on the teen's videos; restrict who can send private messages to the account; set the amount of time spent on the app daily; see the teen's time spent on the app; restrict the teen's ability to search for content; restrict push notifications to the teen during certain times; add hashtags or key words to block certain topics from the kid's For You feed. It also allows for the enabling of TikTok's STEM feed on the teen's account.
Finally, in an attempt to encourage the type of conversations stressed by Murphy and other experts, TikTok partnered with the Family Online Safety Institute to launch the Digital Safety Partnership for Families, which is part of the platform's Guardian's Guide.
It's also worth noting that other platforms, not just TikTok, also allow children to unpair their accounts from their parents, including Google, Snapchat and Instagram.
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