Teens on Instagram will soon be automatically entered into a new type of account with built-in privacy restrictions to give parents more control.
Tuesday, YuanThe social media platform’s parent company will begin rolling out its “Teen Accounts” feature, which aims to put all teenagers, including those who may be trying to lie about their age, into private accounts that can only be messaged by , tag, or mention: People they already follow. It’s the company’s biggest move yet to regulate how minors use Instagram.
The feature is Meta’s latest effort to address child safety concerns on its platform. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologize to parents in the senate Online Child Safety Hearing Who says Instagram caused their children’s suicide or exploitation.
In recent years, the company has released various features and opt-in restrictions targeted at teenage users, including parental controls. But so far, their use has been sporadic.
Meta product director Naomi Gleit said the company has been working to bundle new and existing tools into a more standardized software package.
“Everyone under 18, including creators, will be put into teen accounts,” Greit told NBC News. “They can remain public if their parents are involved and give them permission and monitor the account. But these are big changes we need to get right.”
Grete said the company “got a lot of feedback from parents, mostly about a few things.”
“One, it can be simpler and easier to use, so that was one of the goals of this launch,” she said. “Second, there are some inconsistencies in our current setup…The third thing is wanting to have more control and tools to help their teens get online.”
However, the plan will not be launched immediately. If a new user is under 18, they will be defaulted to a teen account when they sign up, but existing teen users may not see the change immediately. According to the meta table, many people around the world won’t be credited with teen accounts until next year.
In addition to new privacy restrictions, such accounts will be placed in the most restrictive content settings to limit Potentially sensitive content From accounts they don’t follow. These accounts will also have “hidden words” enabled, meaning offensive words or phrases should be automatically filtered out of any comments or direct messages they receive.
Users under 16 will need permission from a parent or other guardian to change their new teen account settings, while teens over 16 will be able to adjust these settings themselves unless their account is still associated with a parent manager.
Greit said Meta wants teens to try to find workarounds, which is why it plans to test a series of measures to prevent them from changing their age or creating new accounts with adult birthdays.
“If you have an account and you try to create a new account on the same phone, we will ask you for age verification, so ask for a government-issued ID or ask for a video selfie to prove you,” Greter said. age.
Meta can also track teens who use different devices to create adult accounts, for example, if they sign up using the same email address or phone number as the original teen account.
“We’re also developing technology to try to predict whether people who have the age of majority, whether we think they’re lying, might actually be teenagers,” Greter said. “For those people, we also want to ask them for age verification. , and deposit them into youth accounts as well.”
The technology, which Meta says is an industry first, uses artificial intelligence to help Instagram predict whether a user is over 18, even if their account lists an adult birthday.
The age prediction tool, scheduled for testing in the United States early next year, will scrutinize behavioral signals such as when an account was created, the type of content and account it interacts with, and the way a user writes. People who Meta believes may be teenagers will be asked to verify their age.
Greit declined to reveal deeper details about how the technology works, saying the company hopes to prevent teenagers from figuring out how to bypass its detection tools.
Parents who set up supervisory controls (requiring both guardians and their children to opt in) can now see who their children have been messaging – although they can’t read the actual conversations. They can also view the topics teens have expressed interest in, as teen accounts will be able to select specific topics they want to see more content on the Explore page.
For teen accounts, a new “sleep mode” (replacing the existing silent mode and night boost feature) will silence notifications and send automatic replies between 10pm and 7am
These accounts will also receive a new “daily limit” prompt, encouraging them to close Instagram after 60 minutes of use. Parental supervisors will be able to further customize when they want to prevent teens from accessing the app or set a maximum time limit per day.
But just as teenagers might lie about their age on social media, Meta is preparing for those who might try to hijack parental control controls. Teen accounts won’t be able to supervise other teen accounts, and the number of teen accounts one person can supervise will be limited, Greter said.
“Our approach is really to put parents in control,” Greit said. “We believe parents know their children best, so I don’t think all of these controls will necessarily work for everyone, but we want to give parents options to choose what’s right for their children.”
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