Instagram privatizes teen accounts as pressure grows to keep kids safe – Press Telegram

By Barbara Ortutay | Associated Press Press Agency

Instagram is making teen accounts private by default in an effort to make the platform safer for children amid growing criticism of the impact of social media on young people’s lives.

Starting Tuesday in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, anyone under 18 who signs up for Instagram will be placed on restrictive teen accounts, and those with existing accounts will be migrated over the next 60 days. Teen accounts in the European Union will be adjusted later this year.

Meta acknowledges that teens may lie about their age and says it will require them to verify their age in more cases, such as when they try to create a new account with an adult’s birth date. The Menlo Park-based company also said it is developing technology that proactively finds accounts of teens pretending to be adults and automatically places them in restricted teen accounts.

Teen accounts will be private by default. Private messages are restricted, so teens can only receive messages from people they follow or are already connected to. “Sensitive content,” such as videos of people fighting or promoting beauty treatments, will be restricted, Meta said. Teens will also receive notifications if they’re on Instagram for more than 60 minutes, and a “sleep mode” will be enabled that turns off notifications and sends automatic replies to direct messages from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.

While these settings will be enabled for all teens, 16- and 17-year-olds will be able to turn them off. Children under 16 will need parental consent to do so.

“The three concerns we hear from parents are that their teens are seeing content they don’t want to see, or that they’re being contacted by people they don’t want to be contacted, or that they’re spending too much money on the app,” said Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product. “So the teen accounts are really focused on addressing those three concerns.”

The statement comes after the company faced lawsuits from dozens of U.S. states accusing it of harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and intentionally designing features on Instagram and Facebook that make children addicted to those platforms.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said the announcement by Meth was “an important first step, but much more needs to be done to ensure our children are protected from the harms of social media.” James’ office is working with other New York officials on how to implement a new state law aimed at limiting children’s access to what critics call addictive social media channels.

In the past, Meta’s efforts to address teen safety and mental health on its platforms have been met with criticism that the changes don’t go far enough. For example, while kids will get a notification when they spend 60 minutes on the app, they can skip it and continue scrolling.

Unless the child’s parents enable “parental supervision” mode, in which they can limit the time the teenager spends on Instagram to a specific time period, e.g. 15 minutes.

With its latest changes, Meta is giving parents more options to supervise their children’s accounts. Those under 16 will need permission from a parent or guardian to change their settings to less restrictive ones. They can do this by setting “parental supervision” on their accounts and connecting them to a parent or guardian.

Nick Clegg, global president of Meta, said last week that parents are not using the parental controls the company has introduced in recent years.

Gleit said she thinks teen accounts will be “a big incentive for parents and teens to establish parental supervision.”

“Parents will be able to see, through the family hub, who is messaging their teen and hopefully have a conversation with their teen,” she said. “If there is bullying or harassment, parents will have insight into who their teen is following, who is following their teen, who their teen has been messaging in the last seven days and hopefully be able to have some of those conversations and help them navigate those really difficult online situations.”

US Health Secretary Vivek Murthy said last year that tech companies put too much responsibility on parents when it comes to keeping children safe when using social media.

“We’re asking parents to steward technology that’s evolving rapidly and that’s fundamentally changing how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by the way, that previous generations never had to deal with,” Murthy said in May 2023.

Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre in New York contributed to this report.