Tech Desk
Sep 18, 2024
Instagram is set to introduce Teen Accounts to automatically enroll users into an app experience with built-in protections.
The company unveiled that it will begin placing out new updates to its parental supervision feature that let parents monitor their child’s activity on the social network.
The replacements came nine months after Instagram, alongside other popular social networks, was grilled by lawmakers for not doing enough to protect young users on its platform.
Meanwhile, teens on Instagram are already placed into different protections by default, they have the choice to opt out of them if they don’t have a supervised account.
Currently, they’ll be required their parent’s permission to do so if they’re under 16 — even if they don’t have a supervised account.
This change focuses on addressing concerns that Instagram’s teen protections were more for show than actually meeting the safety requirements lawmakers and regulators have been proposing.
Read more: Instagram comments may soon appear on Threads
The new built-in protections are set to limit who can contact a teen on the app and will restrict the type of content the account holder can view. To request a change, teens are said to be required to set up parental supervision and ask permission.
With a Teen Account, teens will need to select whether or not to accept new followers and can only receive messages from people they follow or are already connected to.
Moreover, teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow, along with a Meta-owned social media platform set to automatically filter out abusive words and phrases from a teen’s DMs and comments on their posts.
In addition, parents will be able to determine how much time their child is allowed to spend on the Instagram each day. After their child has crossed that time limit, they won’t be able to access the app.
