Teen Instagram users will soon be automatically put into private accounts with built-in restrictions.
Instagram’s parent company, Meta, said that the social media app will bolster its protection of minors by only allowing them to interact with and message people they already follow, at least by default. Teen accounts will also have restrictions that limit being shown sensitive content from accounts they don’t follow, and the app will automatically enable Hidden Words, wich automatically filters negative and inappropriate content in comments and DMs.
Like recent news about schools banning cell phones, it’s partly an attempt by Meta to keep minors safe from negative mental health impacts of social media. The changes put more power into parents’ hands, when typically it can be difficult for them to keep tabs on their kids’ social media behavior. While it’s not going as far as Arkansas’s Social Media Safety Act—which makes it illegal for teens to even be on social media without parental consent—Instagram’s new restrictions could help parents better understand how their kids use the app.
“Everyone under 18, creators included, will be put into teen accounts,” Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta, told NBC News. “They can remain public if their parent is involved and gives them permission and is supervising the account. But these are pretty big changes that we need to get right.”
The change was big enough for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to post about it.
While Instagram won’t be rolling out this update immediately, new users under 18 will be automatically assigned teen accounts. Current teen users will likely not see these changes until next year.
“If you have one account and then you try to create a new account on the same phone, we will ask you to age-verify, so asking for a government ID or asking for a video selfie to prove your age,” Gleit said. “And we’re also working on a technology to try to predict, for people that have a stated age as an adult, do we think they’re lying and they might actually be a teen. For those people, we also want to ask them to age-verify and put them in teen accounts, as well.”
This vetting will be done via AI, which will predict whether a user is actually the age they claim to be.
“Our approach really is to give parents control,” Gleit said. “We think parents know their teens best, and so I don’t think that all of those controls are necessarily right for everyone, but we want to give parents the options to choose what’s right for their child.”
In a related recent move, YouTube decreased recommendations of body-image-related content for teens and enabled other options that let parents monitor their kids’ activity.
The post Instagram Locks Down ‘Teen Accounts’ with New Parental Controls appeared first on VICE.
The post Instagram Locks Down ‘Teen Accounts’ with New Parental Controls appeared first on VICE.
