Keeping accounts private, Sleep Mode among them
Bowing to the mounting pressure on social media companies to stop facilitating the sexual and social abuse of young users, Meta-owned Instagram took a big step Wednesday, announcing sweeping changes to the rules for the network.
Effective immediately, new and existing users under 18 will be classified as “teen accounts,” which protections such as blocking all attempts at instant messages and a “Sleep Mode” that silences all notifications from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.
Instagram will continue to block inappropriate content in Reels and the Explore function, and teens will get to pick age-appropriate topics they’d like to see more of in Explore.
Meta’s Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis, in an interview with The Verge, said, “This really standardizes a lot of the work that we’ve done, simplifies it, and brings it to all teens. “It provides essentially a set of protections that are in place and are already populated.”
Parents are getting some beefed-up control features, as well. They’ll be able to see who their teen has messaged in the last 7 days (but not the content of the messages) and see which topics they’ve chosen to see most often.
Teens over 16 will be able to alter some of these controls, but younger kids will still need parental approval for changes such as making an account public. Parents will have to set up IG parental controls.
While teens can still lie about their age when setting up their pages, Meta will use cues to determine if a user is actually the age they say they are. If a 20-year-old gets wished “Happy 15th birthday,” for example, Meta’s security software will flag that for investigation. It won’t be a perfect system, something Meta has already acknowledged, but it’s still a big step forward for a company that’s taken the brunt of criticism over social media being used for exploitation of teens.