(Photo: Clarote & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / User/Chimera / CC-BY 4.0)
Spending time on TikTok entertains us, helps us find friends, and can even make us money. But, many fear that excessive screen time could harm physical and mental health, especially for youth. As a remedy some experts advocate for screen time controls the platform has now implemented.
But limiting screen time may not solve the problem. Adults drastically over-estimate the time they spend on TikTok. So, we’re likely to set a screen time limit far above the time we are already spending, if we set a limit at all.
This is not surprising. We are not very good at estimating the time we spend on any digital technology. On average, we overestimate the time we spend on Facebook by nearly 2 hours a day. Same is true on TikTok.
We know, because we’ve done the research. Two hundred and fifty-five people from around the world donated their TikTok data to our team of researchers at Harvard University, the University of Washington, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, University of Waterloo, and Delft University of Technology. We asked our data donors how much time they think they spend on TikTok every week. Using data from their phones, we calculated how much time they actually spend on the platform.
Our donors spend an average of 25 minutes a day on TikTok. Far less than the 2 hours a day they fear they spend.
Our guilt over the time we spend on TikTok is larger than the time we really spend on it. And, limiting that time may exacerbate that guilt. Even knowing you can limit the time you spend on a platform leads you to spend more time on it. And participants in our study who restricted how many times a day they used the platform were even more likely to overestimate how long they spent using it.
Instead of focusing on how much time we spend on TikTok, maybe we need to focus on how we use it. Experts have suggested that actively using social media is less harmful than just passively scrolling through the For You feed. However, recent evidence suggests active use can be just as problematic. For example, someone failing to reply to the comment you posted on their video could hurt.
Perversely, our research suggests active use might also make us over estimate how much time we’re spending even more. Participants who used TikTok more actively, for example by liking more videos, were even more likely to overestimate the time they spent. Psychology research suggests this may be because our brains use the number of actions we’ve taken to help us estimate time. The more actions we take, the longer we think we’ve spent doing something.
Like a restrictive diet, controlling how much time we spend on TikTok will only make us feel worse about the time we spend. Instead, we need to do the hard work of critically reflecting on how we’re spending our time. Are we enjoying ourselves? What content are we consuming? How is it shaping what we think? How is it making us feel about ourselves, about others? Even for youth, research suggests these reflections are more effective than restrictive controls.