Thirty years ago, parents everywhere were compelled to weigh the pros and cons of allowing their kids to see Titanic. At the time, it was the biggest movie ever made, a historical epic (potentially educational) about mass death (possibly traumatizing) with a romantic plotline that was maybe too exciting (you know what I mean!). It was rated PG-13—a guideline that recommended caution but ultimately ruled the movie to be appropriate for millions of teenagers—resulting in a fortune for its creators and the subsequent blessings of Leonardo DiCaprio’s career.
Instagram is now adopting the same label for a teen-safety feature, but the possible outcomes are less discrete and obvious. Meta announced earlier this week that all Instagram users under the age of 18 will be automatically placed in what it’s calling a PG-13 version of the app, where only content that might appear in a PG-13 movie will, ideally, be visible. “We hope this update reassures parents that we’re working to show teens safe, age-appropriate content on Instagram by default,” the company wrote in a news post.
This is an update to an existing Teen Accounts feature, which already sought to limit exposure to graphic violent and sexual content, as well as to posts promoting cosmetic procedures and eating disorders, alcohol and tobacco sales, and other things that parents frequently worry about their kids seeing online. Although the PG-13 rating would seem to give a lot of leeway, it’s actually more restrictive than the system that was in place: It expands the internal list of worrisome content. Now, according to the update, posts about “certain risky stunts” may also be hidden, for example, while posts containing “strong language” will be removed from teens’ recommendations. Accounts that regularly share inappropriate things will be hidden from users under 18.
Whereas the old version of Teen Accounts applied wide content restrictions to users ages 13 to 16 by default, but allowed more flexibility to 17-year-olds, the PG-13 setting now restricts them as well—strange, given that they can see an R-rated movie, to extend the movie metaphor. (Parents who are feeling more or less permissive are able to toggle from the PG-13 default to a more heavily filtered Limited Content setting or a relatively lenient More Content setting.)
Although I can understand the tricky position Instagram is in—Liza Crenshaw, a spokesperson on the youth-and-well-being team at Meta, told me that the company surveyed thousands of parents who consistently said that they were worried about what their kids were seeing on the platform—the update feels oddly simplistic, unlikely to satisfy people who are reasonably concerned about an array of highly complex problems. After at least half a decade of acute concern about the way that platforms such as Instagram may affect young people, as well as intense debate about how best to keep kids safe online, Meta has arrived at a label that was invented in the 1980s because parents were upset by movies such as Gremlins.
Content-moderation experts I spoke with this week were baffled. “Why would Meta choose a system that doesn’t graft neatly onto social media, but was rather designed in another era?” Shauna Pomerantz, a professor of child and youth studies at Brock University who studies social media, told me when I sent her the press release.
When I asked, Crenshaw suggested that PG-13 is a simple and legible construct with which parents are already familiar. “They wanted an easier way to understand the guidelines,” she told me. Making PG-13 the baseline—the place where all users ages 13 to 18 start out—was clarifying for them. It gave them a quick mental frame of reference because they know, basically, what is and isn’t allowed in a PG-13 movie from years of exposure to that rubric. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School who teaches courses on content moderation, called it “a Gen X–nostalgia move.”
Additionally, the PG-13 rating seems to imply that something fundamental has changed about Instagram—that Meta now views the platform more like a movie theater, where audiences passively witness content, than a social network, where individuals engage in ongoing meaning-making together. Even if there’s some truth to the idea (surveys from Gallup and Pew have shown that users are more likely to consume content than post it themselves), Instagram posts are inevitably part of larger conversations that evolve moment to moment.
Grimmelmann noted that the new system is a blunt intervention. “It means that Meta is backing away from the most important piece of content moderation: context sensitivity.” He suspected that plenty of inoffensive content would be taken down accidentally, because such a sweeping moderation effort “won’t have the nuance to appreciate differences between showing, glorifying, discussing, and criticizing.” The PG-13 system will certainly steer teenagers away from content that could be truly harmful to them—a good thing!—but it may also curtail information and creative expression.
For example, you can imagine inadvertent filtering of conversations about violence, sexuality, or substance use that may actually be appropriate for a 17-year-old who is about to enter college or the workforce. The PG-13 rating raises obvious questions about, say, disturbing news footage that might be discussed in a social-studies class but filtered by Instagram. And does it really make sense that a teenager would be unable to follow the pop star Charli XCX, because she posts photos of herself smoking cigarettes, or an account aggregating stills from French films, because the people in them are sometimes nude?
All of these problems are only becoming more complicated, and weirder, in the age of artificial intelligence. The announcement from Meta also noted briefly that the PG-13 restrictions will apply to its AI-chatbot and AI-character features: “AIs should not give age-inappropriate responses that would feel out of place in a PG-13 movie.” Stupid and ugly AI-generated content, such as this video my colleague sent me of a man barfing up a stream of whole hot dogs, is not mentioned. (Parents will also be able to restrict teens’ access to AI tools.)
Many of the efforts to help kids navigate social media are sold with the throwback language of abstinence and purity. For instance, the Wait Until 8th movement asks parents to sign a pledge saying they won’t give their kids smartphones until eighth grade, and the Appstinence organization, a college-student-led group, encourages young people to delete social-media apps. The social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book The Anxious Generation, which has become a bible of sorts for many parent groups, draws an explicit dichotomy between the good childhoods of previous generations—when kids rode bikes to one another’s houses, made tire swings, and entertained themselves—and the worse childhoods of today. One of Haidt’s oft-repeated ideas is that modern kids are dramatically over-supervised offline and dramatically under-supervised online. He argues that kids should be empowered to move around the offline world alone more often, but that social media should not be available to kids under 16 at all.
When I spoke with Crenshaw, I had this cultural backdrop in mind. I mentioned that a lot of the broad content-moderation efforts of the recent past ended up stifling conversation about many of the things for which teenagers most value social media. They go online to express themselves creatively, explore their identities, and hear from other people about their experiences—maybe crassly at times, or in ways that are uncomfortable to adults, but that isn’t necessarily harmful. “It’s a really challenging one and something we always have to balance when it comes to content,” Crenshaw told me. “Where we are right now is we really want to err on the side of caution when it comes to teen’s experiences.”
Listening to parents is a welcome departure from Instagram’s past, when moderation decisions were made entirely behind closed doors. The new PG-13 system will regularly survey parents to ask whether individual posts seem appropriate or inappropriate for teens—which some may find annoying and needlessly time-consuming, and others may welcome as evidence of a new respect and conscientiousness.
Still, the anachronistic label may ultimately be a false comfort. People may long for the days when questions were as simple as “Should I let my daughter see Titanic?” But that’s not the world we live in.
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