Instagram places restrictions on teenage accounts

2024-09-17 21:34:28, Tech CNA

Instagram is automatically making teen accounts private, limiting others' access to the content of those accounts. This is intended to make the platform safer for children. The decision was made as the social network faces increasing pressure on how social media affects the lives of young people.

Starting Tuesday in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, users under the age of 18 who open Instagram accounts will be placed on the teen account restriction list. Those who already have existing accounts will be moved to that list over the next 60 days. The accounts of teenagers in the European Union will switch to private accounts later this year.

Meta, which also owns Instagram, acknowledges that teenagers can lie about their age and says it will ask them to verify their ages on more occasions and see if they try to create an account. re with an adult birthday. The Menlo Park, California company also said it is building technology that proactively finds accounts of teenagers pretending to be adults and automatically places them in restricted teen accounts.

Teen accounts will be private automatically. Private messages sent to these accounts will also be restricted, so teens can only receive them from people they follow.

"Sensitive content," such as videos of people fighting or those promoting cosmetic procedures, will be restricted, Meta said. Teens will also receive notifications if they use Instagram for more than 60 minutes and it will be activated a mode that turns off notifications and sends auto-replies to people who text between 10pm and 7am.

While these actions will be turned on for all teens, 16- and 17-year-olds will be able to turn them off. Children under 16 will need parental permission to do so.

"The three concerns we're hearing from parents are that their teens are seeing content they don't want to see or that they're being contacted by people they don't want to be contacted or that they're also spending too much on the app," said Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta. "So adolescent accounts now really focus on addressing these three concerns."

The announcement comes as the company faces lawsuits from dozens of US states accusing it of harming young people and contributing to the deterioration of young people's mental health by knowingly and intentionally creating features on Instagram and Facebook that get children addicted to the platforms. her.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said Meta's announcement was "an important first step, but much more must be done to ensure our children are protected from the harms of social media." Ms. James' office is working with other New York officials on how to implement a new state law aimed at curbing children's access to what critics call addictive social media content.

In the past, Meta's efforts to address teen safety and mental health on its platforms have faced criticism that the changes don't go far enough. For example, while kids will get a notification when they've spent 60 minutes in the app, they'll be able to override it and stay in the app.

This only changes if the child's parents turn on the "parental control" mode, where parents can limit the teen's time on Instagram to a specific time, such as 15 minutes.

With recent changes, Meta is giving parents more options to supervise their children's accounts. Those under 16 will need a parent or guardian's permission to change the restrictive measures.

Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said last week that parents are not using the parental controls the company has introduced in recent years.

The head of product at Meta Gleit said she thinks the current teen accounts will "encourage parents and teens to put parental controls in place."

"Parents will be able to see who is texting their teen and hopefully have a conversation with their teen," she said. "If bullying happens, parents will have access to see who their teen is following, who is following their teen, who their teen has messaged in the last seven days, and hopefully have some of those conversations and help them get through these really tough situations online.

America's top public health official, Vivek Murthy, said last year that tech companies expect too much from parents when it comes to keeping kids safe on social media.

"We're asking parents to manage a rapidly evolving technology that is fundamentally changing the way their children think about themselves, how they form friendships, how they experience the world – and the technology, by the way, that previous generations never had to manage it," said Murthy in May 2023./ VOA