After the whistleblower scandal on how Facebook/Instagram are negatively impacting teen’s mental health earlier this year, Instagram is set to roll out parental controls in March. These new features will allow parents to see how much time is spent on the app, set time limits, and alert parents if they report an account. Instagram’s parental controls are noticeably less strict than on their rival platform TikTok, however they are working on features to protect teens from unwanted adult contact.
Instagram is defaulting teen accounts to private, restricting target advertising and using tech to identify “potentially suspicious behavior” from adult users. Adults are also restricted from being able to contact teens who don’t already follow them. This includes not being able to tag them as well.
The platform will become stricter on what’s recommended to teens in features of the app including Search, Explore, Hashtags and suggested accounts. They are also working on a feature that will nudge people away from topics they’ve been dwelling on for a while to new ones. However, Instagram is being a bit vague about the what this entails and some are skeptical that it would be used to push people to influencer content where the app makes the most money.
Only time will tell how successful these new rollouts will be to protect teens. Many see these new features as an empty product Meta employed to shift attention away from the main problems that triggered it.
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