TikTok caps Alabama teens at two hours a day and locks them out at midnight

TikTok has agreed to limit teenagers in Alabama to two hours on the app a day, interrupt them with forced breaks and shut the app off overnight, under a settlement with the state’s attorney general, Steve Marshall. The deal also takes beauty filters away from teen accounts and switches their default feed to one that is not personalized. A US state has now written the design of TikTok’s teen experience into a legal agreement, not a company blog post.

For a teenager, that is a very different app. Long scrolling sessions get broken up by what the settlement calls “productive pauses”. Messages and push notifications are restricted overnight and during school hours, so the phone stops buzzing in class. And the non-personalized default feed goes after the For You page itself, the recommendation engine that learns what keeps each user watching and the main reason most people open TikTok at all.

The pauses land at 15, 60 and 90 minutes of continuous use, and access is blocked from midnight to 6 a.m. The two-hour figure sounds generous next to what TikTok already offers. Accounts registered to under-18s have carried a default 60-minute daily screen-time prompt since 2023, but a teen can dismiss it by typing a passcode and keep watching. The settlement is a different kind of promise: a limit agreed with a state, backed by parental controls and paired with stronger age verification, so a 15-year-old cannot simply claim to be an adult to skip it.

Screen time is only part of the package. TikTok must also limit how adults can discover teen accounts, alert parents to suspicious contact between adults and teens, and tighten content moderation. It will pay Alabama at least $100 million within 45 days, a sum that can rise to $300 million if 40 other state attorneys general sign similar agreements within a set window. The lawsuit accused TikTok of designing an addictive product, exposing young users to mental harm and misleading the public about how safe the platform is. TikTok said the agreement “builds on our commitment and core objective to continually enhance our robust safety tools to protect teens.”

The fine print leaves big questions open. Neither the attorney general’s office nor TikTok has said when the changes go live, which ages count as a teen, or whether a parent can raise the two-hour cap. Stronger age checks also cut both ways: proving a user’s age usually means handing over an ID, a face scan or other data that privacy advocates would rather teenagers never share. And the protections, as announced, cover Alabama only. As Reuters noted, major platform changes are hard to build state by state, which could push TikTok to roll them out more widely, but nothing announced so far commits it to that.

Outside the United States, this deal changes nothing yet. Teens in Europe, Asia and Latin America keep the settings TikTok already applies in their country, and Australia already bars under-16s from holding social media accounts at all. What the Alabama agreement hands regulators elsewhere is a checklist of specific minutes, specific hours and specific features, instead of general promises about safety tools.

Marshall announced the settlement on September 25, cancelling a trial against TikTok and its parent company ByteDance that was due to open in Montgomery on Monday, September 28. The state first sued in April 2025. At least 27 other states and Washington, DC, have filed similar lawsuits, and TikTok has settled every case previously selected for trial, including claims brought by five young people and a Kentucky school district.

The $300 million ceiling is the number to watch. If 40 attorneys general sign on, the Alabama rulebook stops being a local experiment and becomes something close to a national standard for how American teenagers use TikTok.

Tags: tiktok, social media, ByteDance, teen safety, screen time, Alabama