“Family Pairing” is the new, important function that TikTok is releasing in order to give parents more options and ways to manage their child’s time on the application, according to Social Media Today.
This new feature also allows parents to protect their children from unwanted exposure to offensive content and potential predators.
“Today, we are advancing our commitment to building for the safety of our users by introducing Family Pairing, which allows parents and teens to customize their safety settings based on individual needs,” TikTok explains. “Family Pairing is part of our continued work toward providing parents better ability to guide their teen’s online experience while allowing time to educate about online safety and digital citizenship.”
Family Pairing is a feature that allows parents to link their child’s TikTok account onto theirs, thus giving parents a new set of controls over the child’s on-platform activity, according to Social Media Today.
There are three key elements involved in Family Pairing:
- Screen Time Management
- Which allows parents to set limits on how long their children can spend on TikTok each day.
- Restricted Mode
- Which gives parents the ability to set restrictions on content that may not be appropriate, based on TikTok’s moderation tools
- Direct Messages
- The most important element which allows parents to restrict who can send messages to their child’s TikTok account or turn off direct messaging completely.
In order to improve their guidelines, TikTok will be automatically disabling direct messages for users under the age of 16 as of April 30th, however, users will still be able to manually switch them back on, if they choose to, according to Social Media Today.
The Family Pairing tools come hand in hand with TikTok’s Parents’ Guide as well as its safety tips account in order to help younger users understand the rists and issues involved regarding social media usage, according to Social Media Today.
In order to read more about Family Pairing click here; in addition to this, it is important to note that TikTok is technically not available for users under the age of 13.
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below.