Dozens of video apps including Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — have features that limit children to 40 minutes a day on their apps and lock them out from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., as well as restrict the content they can see.
There are technical challenges in restricting how children use their phones.
The Shanghai Consumers Council investigated 20 apps this year and found that some of their controls were lacking or unusable. Some apps showed no content at all when “youth mode” was turned on or showed videos that were “overly monotonous and dry,” the report found. The study found that one app that claimed to recommend different videos to children based on their age showed 4-year-olds the same cartoons as 14-year-olds.
The Chinese government heavily regulates and even censors what people see on the internet in the country. The new proposal could increase the authorities’ control, said Eric Lim, a senior lecturer in information systems and technology at the University of New South Wales.
“The question becomes, who’s going to be the final arbiter of what constitutes good or appropriate content for a certain age group?” he said.
It was unclear how the measures set out in the proposal would be enforced, Sun Sun Lim said, though she added that the regulatory effort reflected parents’ anxieties about their children’s smartphone use.
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