OAN Staff Avril Elfi
Tuesday, September 17, 2024 at 4:00 p.m.
Instagram has announced that it will implement new “Teen Account” settings to protect young, impressionable users on the platform.
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On Tuesday, the social media app announced new settings that will automatically make teen accounts private and limit the content they can view.
Instagram will automatically apply the new “teen account” setting to all users under the age of 18.
The new regulations also aim to highlight the value and acceptance of parental supervision and encourage parents with teenage children to allow their children to use the apps.
After the update, 16 and 17 year olds will be able to manually restore the app to their preferred settings, but users between 13 and 15 will still need parental permission.
The new “teen account” setting changes come after Meta came under immense pressure to protect its young users following allegations about the company from whistleblower Arturo Bejar, who alleged at a Senate subcommittee hearing in November that Meta's top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, ignored warnings for years about the potential harm to teens on the company's platform.
Court documents in the latest lawsuit against Meta allege that Zuckerberg repeatedly evaded “welfare initiatives” for teenagers, and that the company harbored child abusers by knowingly refusing to close the accounts of children under the age of 13.
In January, Zuckerberg appeared at a Senate hearing and apologized to families of children who had been harmed by the company's social media apps.
Mehta said the recent changes are aimed at “addressing parents' biggest concerns: who their teens are talking to online, what content they're viewing, and whether their time is being used effectively.”
The “Teen Accounts” update also means that new and existing accounts for users under the age of 18 will automatically be set to private and will have the strictest messaging settings possible.
With the update, teens will only be able to receive messages from people they're already connected to (friends with), and Instagram will restrict the ability to tag teens in photos or mention them in comments to only those they follow.
The changes will limit the type of “sensitive” content teens can view on the app's “Explore” page and Reels (Instagram videos), such as posts promoting cosmetic surgery and sexually explicit content.
However, Instagram had already begun rolling out a similar strategy on a limited basis earlier this year.
Now, teen users will also receive time-limit notifications, prompting them to quit the app after one hour of use each day: between 10pm and 7am, the app will switch to “sleep mode,” mute notifications, and send auto-replies to direct messages.
Additionally, the app is adding new features to its parental monitoring tools, allowing parents to see which accounts their children have recently messaged, set a daily total time limit for their children's Instagram usage, block their children from using Instagram at night or during certain hours, and see what content their children have viewed on the app.
The change will be rolled out to all teen accounts in the US, UK, Canada and Australia over the next 60 days, and to other countries later this year and next. Instagram plans to apply the change to all teen accounts in select countries, including the US, starting as early as next week.
But the company has no way of knowing for sure whether a teen's account is actually being monitored by a parent, rather than the teen's older friends. Meta says it doesn't do formal parental verification, but that it decides whether to allow an account to be monitored based on “signals” such as an adult user's date of birth and how many other accounts they're monitoring.
Meta has long been criticized for not doing enough to stop young people from lying about their age when creating new accounts to circumvent safety measures, and the company said it was deploying artificial intelligence (AI) technology to identify youth accounts that may be falsely listing their adult birthdates.
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