Instagram is introducing new “teen accounts” in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia on Tuesday.
These accounts will provide greater “built-in protections” for young people and added restrictions for parents.
Meta, the social media platform’s parent company, will begin rolling out its “teen accounts” feature, which intends to place all minors, including those who may try to mislead about their ages, under secret accounts that can only be messaged, tagged, or discussed by individuals they already follow.
Newsng gathered that it’s the company’s most significant step yet towards regulating how kids use Instagram.
They will enable numerous privacy options by default for all under-18s, including making their content inaccessible to anyone who does not follow them and requiring them to manually accept all new followers.
However, youngsters aged 13 to 15 will only be allowed to change their settings after adding a parent or guardian to their account.
In recent years, the corporation has introduced many features and opt-in limits intended specifically for young users, such as parental monitoring controls. However, they have only been used occasionally thus far.
Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product, stated that the company has been trying to combine new and current products into a more standardised package.
The new “teen accounts” settings add to more than 30 well-being and parental monitoring measures introduced by parent firm Meta in recent years, including “take a break” nudges and limitations on “age-inappropriate” content such as eating disorder messages.
Despite those earlier upgrades, the firm has continued to receive criticism for putting too much responsibility for safety on parents and, in some cases, kids themselves.
The parental supervision capabilities, for example, relied on teenagers informing parents that they were using the app.
“Everyone under 18, creators included, will be put into teen accounts,” Gleit 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.”
We earlier reported that Instagram is updating its inbox with new photo editing, sticker creation, and theme options.
