Instagram is making teen accounts private by default in an effort to make the platform safer for minors, amid mounting criticism of how social media affects young people’s lives.
Beginning Tuesday, anybody under the age of 18 who signs up for Instagram in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia will be assigned to restricting teen accounts, and those with existing accounts will be transferred over the next 60 days. Teenagers in the European Union will have their accounts updated later this year.
Meta agrees that teens may lie about their age and says they will be required to verify their ages in additional situations, such as when they attempt to register a new account with an adult birthday. The Menlo Park, California company also stated that it is developing technology to detect teen accounts that appear to be adults and immediately place them in limited teen accounts.
Instagram Makes Teen Accounts Private As Pressure Mounts On The App To Protect Children
Teen accounts will be private by default. Private messages are controlled, so teenagers can only receive them from persons they follow or are already linked with. “Sensitive content,” such as footage of individuals fighting or advertisements for cosmetic procedures, will be limited, Meta stated. Teens will also receive notifications if they spend more than 60 minutes on Instagram, and a “sleep mode” will be enabled, which disables notifications and sends auto-replies to direct messages between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
These settings will be enabled for all teens, but 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to disable them. Children under the age of 16 must obtain permission from their parents.
“The three concerns we’re hearing from parents are that their teens are seeing content that they don’t want to see or that they’re getting contacted by people they don’t want to be contacted by or that they’re spending too much on the app,” according to Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta. “So teen accounts is really focused on addressing those three concerns.”
The announcement comes as the firm faces lawsuits from dozens of US states accusing it of endangering young people and contributing to the juvenile mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately developing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.
Letitia James, New York Attorney General, called Meta’s statement “an important first step, but much more needs to be done to ensure our kids are protected from the harms of social media.” James’ office is collaborating with other New York officials on how to enforce a new state law aimed at limiting children’s access to what critics call addictive social media feeds.
Meta’s previous efforts to address teen safety and mental health on its platforms have been received with criticism that the adjustments are insufficient. For example, children will receive a notification when they have spent 60 minutes on the app, but they will be free to ignore it and continue scrolling.
That is, unless the child’s parents use “parental supervision” mode, which allows parents to limit kids’ Instagram usage to a set length of time, such as 15 minutes.
Meta’s most recent changes provide parents with more options for managing their children’s accounts. To modify their settings to less restrictive ones, those under the age of 16 will require permission from their parent or guardian. They can accomplish this by enabling “parental supervision” on their accounts and linking them with a parent or guardian.
Meta’s president of worldwide affairs, Nick Clegg, stated this week that parents do not use the parental controls that the business has implemented in recent years.
“Parents will be able to see, via the family centre, who is messaging their teen and hopefully have a conversation with their teen,” she told me. “If there is bullying or harassment happening, parents will have visibility into who their teen’s following, who’s following their teen, who their teen has messaged in the past seven days and hopefully have some of these conversations and help them navigate these really difficult situations online.”
Instagram Makes Teen Accounts Private As Pressure Mounts On The App To Protect Children
Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy stated that digital corporations place too much responsibility on parents to keep their children safe on social networking platforms.
“We’re asking parents to manage a technology that’s rapidly evolving that fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage,” Murthy told CNN in May 2023.
SOURCE | AP
