Instagram introduces teen safety and parental control tools

As Instagram seeks to promote teen safety it has now introduced new measures meant to protect teenagers from the negative effects of overusing the platform as well as from paedophiles. And before you draw some conclusions, it is important to understand the whole argument. 

A few months back, some internal findings from the company were made public. This was part of an investigation called The Facebook Files. The documents revealed that Instagram can have negative effects on users’ mental health. Back then the US Senate demanded answers from the company’s executives about the potential dangers created by Instagram, but they disputed.

Antigone Davis, the company’s head of global safety, was also interrogated the same time Facebook Files leaked. This week, having agreed to show up late last month, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri will be interrogated by the Senate.

So that provides the context for the company’s ‘features’ updates or release, in which it states multiple times that it has been working on these updates for a “long time.”

This is a good move by Instagram, even if it’s not happening at the right time. It will promote teen safety in a lot of ways.

If you want to set limits on how much time your kids spend on Instagram, the platform has added a new parental control option. This will let parents and guardians set limits on how long their kids spend on the app. The new feature will also allow you to see how much time your children are spending on the app and promote teens safety.

Also, when your teen reports someone, you can be notified, and this will give you a chance to be more involved in the process. In the future, Instagram plans to roll out features for this purpose.

Keeping an eye on how long their kids spend on their phones could be a good way for parents to keep an eye on their kids’ screen time, which could be a big help.

Besides this, Instagram has also made official its new “Take a Break” prompts, which were first seen in testing early last month.

After a certain amount of time spent using the app, a new option will let users set reminders to take a break. Users can choose from 10, 20, or 30-minute reminders.  There will be new in-app prompts for people under the age of 18 to make them aware of the tool.

Instagram wants to make sure teens know about this feature by showing them notifications that say that they should turn on these reminders. According to the company, ” Early tests show that when teens set the reminders, more than 90% of them keep them on.”  There are a lot of countries where this feature has rolled out, and Instagram intends to make it available to everyone by early next year.

The company is also trying to make it more difficult for people who don’t follow them to tag or mention them, or to include their content in Reels Remixes or Guides by default, even if they don’t follow them yet.  The company wants to make sure that teens don’t hear from people they don’t want to hear from. 

Updates like these could help Instagram keep more people from acting in a bad way on the app. Instagram already doesn’t let adults message teens who don’t follow them.