Every TikTok user’s For You feed is unique, but at 10 o’clock each night, youth under age 18 are viewing the same thing. In late May, the social media platform launched a nightly in-app guided meditation exercise that prompts individuals to “inhale,” “hold,” and “exhale,” with the idea of helping them unwind before going to sleep. If teens decide to stay online longer, a second prompt — one that is harder to dismiss — will take over the screen; the feature is optional for adults and can be activated in the app’s screen time settings. Following this implementation, the platform introduced additional self-care tools several weeks later, which included smart keyword filtering where users can block words they don’t want to see and topic management where people can control the subjects they’re engaging with.
“It's nice to be able to filter your content because TikTok as an entertainment platform can be great for boosting mental health and helping people unwind and relax,” says Assistant Professor of Communication and Language Studies Jerrica Rowlett, Ph.D., noting that healthy screen time can build social capital – such as relationships or professional networks. “If you want that to be a space where you're not going to doomscroll, it is nice to be able to filter out stressors, like politics.”
Rowlett, who teaches a course on the impacts of digital addiction at Bryant, sees digital wellness in today’s social media landscape as the moderate consumption of beneficial content that's not going to degrade one’s mental health. She notes that the new self-care tools could be a great element to control the content that teens and underage consumers are engaging with.
“We need to monitor what youth consume and make sure that it is not going to be detrimental to their health or radicalize their impressionable minds,” Rowlett says.
According to data from the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 use TikTok while one-third of U.S. adults are on the platform. Additionally, Statista reports that, in 2024, people spent an average of just under an hour on the app each day. Considering whether TikTok’s recent moves are a genuine step toward addressing digital wellness or a public relations strategy, Rowlett says it's complicated.
“The reason they make so much money is because our eyeballs are on the screen,” Rowlett says. “Public perception is, in my opinion, the only reason to try to promote these things to try to show that the social platforms are making an effort to not have people be addicted to it.”
In TikTok’s case, the company was struck with a myriad of lawsuits in October of last year alleging that it created an intentionally addictive app that has harmed children and teens. Rowlett notes that platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit are all places where people are spending just as much time, but these platforms have not received the same extent of backlash as TikTok.
“I think there's a level of fear of it being owned by a Chinese-based company,” Rowlett says. “We have been spoiled that almost all the entertainment media we consume is created in the United States or created by people from the United States. So, having that fear of information from a different place worries people.”
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Rowlett notes that, to her knowledge, no other platforms have implemented self-care features. Instead, she's seen more advertisements promoting other devices and technologies that help individuals step away from social platforms to mitigate digital addiction.
But will the new features result in healthier digital wellness habits? Rowlett says it's layered.
“A more curated For You feed that provides only happy content will make you less likely to put down the phone because you're getting rewarded, and you're not getting the things that are stressing you out,” Rowlett says. “So, you may not be doomscrolling, but it also might lead to higher screen time.”
