Adults suspected of harassing minors they will find it more difficult to act on Facebook e Instagram. Metathe company that owns both social networksannounced this Monday in a statement on his blog changes in his privacy policies privacy that will affect all users who are under 16 or 18 years of age, depending on each country.
These changes will make your settings more private by default, limiting who can see your profiles, posts, friends lists, and other personal details.
Another way to try to protect underage users will be for both Facebook and Instagram to detect suspicious adults. What does that mean? Both Applications Accounts that belong to adults and that have been blocked or reported by young users will be identified as suspicious. These profiles will no longer appear in the recommendations that suggest new friends.
In addition, Instagram studies that these suspicious users cannot send private messages to minor users, a frequent channel for the bullying. These measures do not enter into assessing what will happen if this possible situation of harassment occurs between users who are both minors.
Meta is also working with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to design a platform open to other youth-serving tech companies to prevent teens’ intimate photos from circulating online without their consent.
Mental impact on minors
This decision comes more than a year after Instagram changed its policies so that new registered accounts of young users were, by default, private.
The social media giant was then forced to take action after suffering its biggest reputation crisis when internal documents exposed its impact on the mental health of adolescents. The reports leaked by the ex-engineer Frances Haugen revealed then that, among other abuses, the company was aware that Instagram produces “increasing levels of anxiety y depression” and that “the relationship with their body worsens” for 32% of the girls. Despite knowing about this toxic impact, the company had not done anything to reverse this situation.
User protests in the face of this and other scandals forced Instagram to abandon its idea of creating a version of the platform for children under 13, a project they canceled in September last year.
While mounting pressure has led Meta to take more steps to protect the experience of its younger users, there are reasons to believe that such a move is merely a commercial ploy. Last year, an investigation by different NGOs pointed out that both Facebook and Instagram continue to track the online activity of their users under the age of 18 to direct them personalized advertising, something that they a priori restricted in July 2021. After all, ads make up more than 90% of Meta’s business.