The IT Nerd

In a move that is likely meant to stop them from being sued by regulators and or governments, Instagram which is owned by Meta who also own Facebook had made a move to make teen accounts on Instagram have the following restrictions:

• Private accounts: With default private accounts, teens need to accept new followers and people who don’t follow them can’t see their content or interact with them.
• Messaging restrictions: Teens will be placed in the strictest messaging settings, so they can only be messaged by people they follow or are already connected to.
• Sensitive content restrictions: Teens will automatically be placed into the most restrictive setting of our sensitive content control, which limits the type of sensitive content (such as content that shows people fighting or promotes cosmetic procedures) teens see in places like Explore and Reels.
• Limited interactions: Teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow. We’ll also automatically turn on the most restrictive version of our anti-bullying feature, Hidden Words, so that offensive words and phrases will be filtered out of teens’ comments and DM requests.
• Time limit reminders: Teens will get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day.
• Sleep mode enabled: Sleep mode will be turned on between 10 PM and 7 AM, which will mute notifications overnight and send auto-replies to DMs.

And:

Teens may lie about their age and that’s why we’re requiring them to verify their age in more places, like if they attempt to use a new account with an adult birthday. We’re also building technology to proactively find accounts belonging to teens, even if the account lists an adult birthday. This technology will allow us to proactively find these teens and place them in the same protections offered by Teen Account settings. We’ll start testing this change in the US early next year.

And when can you expect to see these changes?:

We plan to place teens into Teen Accounts within 60 days in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, and in the European Union later this year. Teens around the world will start to get Teen Accounts in January. We’ll also bring Teen Accounts to other Meta platforms next year. These are big updates that will change the Instagram experience for millions of teens, and we need to make sure they work correctly.

This is all stuff that to be frank, Instagram should have done years ago. But instead of making these changes, they’ve resisted. Likely because there was a financial incentive to resist. Clearly Meta feels that the chances that a government or regulator coming in and putting a metaphorical gun to their head is such a threat to them that they’ve stopped resisting. My question is if this goes far enough? Or will Meta find that governments and regulators say “too little, too late.” Stay tuned to find out.

This entry was posted on September 17, 2024 at 9:57 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Instagram. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.