After years of criticism over online bullying, ads that stoke depression, and predators chasing teens on the platform, Menlo Park-based Instagram is tightening up the controls over what teens can see when they log in.
The photo-sharing app Instagram is still quite popular with teens, even if TikTok and Snapchat may be taking some of their attention. And therefore it is also quite popular with sexual predators who try to lure teens, teens who like to bully, and advertisers aiming to manipulate teens’ self-esteem to sell products. The US Surgeon General has said Instagram and other social sites should come with warnings like on a pack of cigarettes, and members of Congress went even further in January hearings grilling Facebook/Instagram/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, telling him, “You have blood on your hands. You have a product that's killing people."
So at long last, Instagram will introduce sweeping new restrictions on accounts for those under 18, according to TechCrunch. They will now be referred to as “Teen Accounts,” and changes will be applied automatically to all users under 18. CNN explains that on Teen Accounts, access to sensitive content will be restricted, the teen cannot be massaged by anyone who they don’t already follow, and parents will be able to monitor their kids’ activity on the platform.
“Teen Accounts have built-in protections which limit who can contact them and the content they see, and also provide new ways for teens to explore their interests,” Meta said in their Tuesday company announcement. “We’ll automatically place teens into Teen Accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent’s permission to change any of these settings to be less strict.”
These teen account users will also get a prompt once they’ve been on Instagram for an hour or longer each day, and a “sleep mode’ that does not send notifications at night time between 10 pm and 7 am.
Teens 16 and older will be automatically switched to Teen Accounts, though can opt out themselves. Teens 15 or younger cannot opt out. Though as CNN points out, Instagram’s parent company Meta has “long faced criticism for failing to do more to prevent teens from lying about their age when they create a new account to bypass safety restrictions.”
The parental controls sound like an excellent tool, though of course, require parents to sign up for an Instagram account themselves.
"Parents will be able to see, via the family center, who is messaging their teen and hopefully have a conversation with their teen," Meta head of product Naomi Gleit told the Associated Press. "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."
Though as the AP notes, “The announcement comes as the company faces lawsuits from dozens of US states that accuse it of harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.” So it’s fair to guess that’s what’s prompting these changes.
According to Meta, new teen users will automatically be classified as Teen Accounts starting today, and existing accounts will be migrated into Teen Accounts next week.
Teen users in countries like the UK, Canada, and Australia will be migrated over in the next 60 days, and the change will take effect worldwide by January 2025. Then, Meta claims, they will introduce similar measures on their other platforms Facebook, Threads, and WhatsApp.
Image: Solen Feyissa via Unsplash
