2024-09-17 13:57:29
Meta has repeatedly been accused of not doing enough to protect children and young people. There are now radical changes for one app.
Parents of teenagers on Instagram will have more control over their children’s use of the app. Young people will soon be automatically sorted into “teen accounts”. This will limit, among other things, who can contact them and what they can see on Instagram.
Users under the age of 16 will only be able to relax the protection with the consent of their parents. In addition, the parent company Meta wants to use artificial intelligence, among other things, to better recognize when teenagers give a false age.
“We think this is the right balance between the rights of teenagers and parents and the role of social media companies like ours,” said Meta policy chief Nick Clegg. The new restrictions could lead to teenagers using Instagram less, he admitted. But the hope is that parents will have more confidence in the precautions being taken to keep their children safe.
The protections that cannot be changed without parental consent until the age of 16 include:
Parents will also be able to check who their teenage children have chatted with in the past seven days. They will not be able to see the content of the messages. Parents can also set a hard time limit for daily use, after which the app will no longer be available – or block access for certain periods of time.
The new teen accounts will initially be introduced in the USA, Great Britain, Canada and Australia. In the EU, it is scheduled to start by the end of the year – and then around the world next year. After that, teen accounts will also be available on other meta platforms. In addition to Instagram, the group also owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads, among others.
The AI systems that look for false age information will evaluate, among other things, profile information as well as interactions with posts and other accounts. This can be used to estimate whether teenagers might be pretending to be adults. The users detected in this way will also be moved to teen accounts – with the option of getting rid of the restrictions in case the software was wrong.
With this initiative, Meta also wants to advance a debate about easy-to-use control mechanisms for parents across apps from different providers, said Clegg. The company – like other online services – is repeatedly accused of not doing enough to protect young users on the platforms.