TikTok is a video-sharing focused social networking service owned by Chinese company ByteDance. This app is known as Douyin in China. This social media platform is used to make a variety of short-form videos, from genres like dance, comedy, and education, that have a duration from fifteen seconds to three minutes. As declared the parent company of TikTok named ByteDance, the Chinese version of this app – Douyin will be limited for users who are under 14 years old in China for a period of 40 minutes.
According to this new limitation, Teens under 14 will be able to access Douyin between 6 AM and 10 PM, but won’t be able to use the app outside of that window. This will be applicable for the real name authentication users who are under 14 and the company has requested parents to their child in completing this real name authentication process or to activate the youth mode when prompted by the app. The Chinese government has taken this precaution to limit the time that Chinese teenagers use this app. Last month, The National Press and Publication Administration of China unveiled new rules, which restrict Chinese citizens under 18 to playing online games only on Fridays, weekends, and holidays, between 8 PM and 9 PM. All the gaming companies and entertainment platforms like Douyin are requested to use real-name identification for their users which requires a phone number and other related identifications to have access to the online gaming portals. ByteDance also has taken action to include educational material such as science experiments, exhibitions in museums and galleries, beautiful scenery across the country, explanations of historical knowledge to the youth mode so that the Teenagers are encouraged to gather some knowledge while entertaining themselves. It’s already proven that the global young generation is excessively wasting their time on social media and Gaming. So, we can say that this decision of China is very timely and should be followed by the governments of the other countries as well.
