Children spend more than two hours a day glued to Tiktok videos

CHILDREN in the UK are using Tiktok for more than two hours a day, making British youngsters some of the heaviest users of the social media app worldwide, a new report has claimed.

British children who use the app spent an average of 127 minutes per day on it last year, a rise of 11 per cent on the previous year, according to Qustodio, the parental controls company. This has almost doubled since 2020, when youngsters spent around 70 minutes on Tiktok each day. It found around 50 per cent of British children in its study used Tiktok, which is typically used to share dance and lip -syncing videos, comedy sketches and live videos.

Tiktok says it does not allow children under the age of 13 on to its video sharing app.

Only Roblox, the video game, came close to Tiktok in terms of popularity. The online app, in which children build virtual worlds and share them with friends, was used by British players under the age of 18 for an average of 125 minutes each day. This compares with data from Roblox, published in its quarterly results, which suggests the average global player spends as much as 2.5 hours on its game per day.

Snapchat was the most popular messaging app among children, with users spending around 95 minutes a day on it.

Instagram, meanwhile, was used on average 40 minutes daily in the UK, while Facebook averaged just 15 minutes of use among the under-18s.

Children spent about 66 minutes on Youtube on a typical day.

Britons’ Tiktok use was among the highest in the study.

Globally, children aged between four and 18 spent 112 minutes per day using the app.

Qustodio, which develops screentime monitoring and parental control tools, gathered anonymous data from 400,000 smartphone users around the world.

Eduardo Cruz, chief executive of Qustodio, said parents, teachers and children needed to talk about how to “strike a healthy digital balance”, while “keeping the youngest in society safe from online harm”.

Overall, the data found children on average spent about four hours per day on phones, tablets, games or computers outside of school hours, unchanged from the previous year.

The amount of time children spend on screens each day has been a hotly debated topic among parents, teachers and researchers for years, even before the arrival of smartphones.

There have long been concerns about children being exposed to harmful internet content, such as pornography, self-harm posts and radicalisation.

In the UK, the Government is considering fresh curbs on social media apps, including enforcing stricter parental controls on services used by under-16s.

Both iphones and Android smartphones allow parents to set daily screen time limits on children’s devices. Tiktok, meanwhile, has added a default screen time limit for children’s accounts of 60 minutes, although they can choose to ignore the warning.

Tiktok was contacted for comment.