Instagram Launches Teen Accounts Amid Child Safety Concerns

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Facts

  • In response to growing child safety concerns from parents and youth groups, Meta-owned social media app Instagram has implemented new restrictions for users under the age of 18.[1]
  • The new features include automatically setting every teen's account — of which there are 100M globally — to private, limiting their direct messaging (DM) only to accounts they follow, and reducing the amount of adult-oriented content they see.[2]
  • Teens will also 'only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow,' receive 'notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day,' hide 'offensive words and phrases' from their 'comments and DM requests,' and 'mute notifications' from 10 pm to 7 am.[3]
  • While the new safeguards have been automatically enabled for every user under 18 years old, 16- and 17-year-olds will be able to disable them on their own. However, those under 16 will need their parent's permission to do so.[4]
  • One Meta executive said they'll use artificial intelligence to search accounts for hints that a user is lying about their age. Parents will also have the ability to both approve their child's request for fewer restrictions and, eventually, 'to change these settings directly to be more protective.'[5][3]
  • This comes as two social media-related bills are being discussed in US Congress: The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would regulate tech companies through a legal 'duty of care,' and another one that would ban targeted advertisements to and non-consensual data collection of minors.[6]

Sources: [1]New York Times, [2]Wsj, [3]Meta, [4]Washington Post, [5]Verge and [6]New York Post.

Narratives

  • Pro-establishment narrative, as provided by Youtube. Instagram is taking extraordinary measures to protect young people and their mental health. Not only has it imposed account privatization and restricted access to harmful content, but it's also utilizing AI to enforce these rules on a global scale. While tens of millions of teens already admit their real age, those who try and bypass the restrictions will have a very tough time of it.
  • Establishment-critical narrative, as provided by HeraldNet.com. Instagram is only taking these measures because the US government is discussing new regulations. And even with these new rules, teens will still create fake accounts, or 'finstas,' which will allow them to easily bypass each of these guardrails. With this bandaid-of-a-policy now in place, the government is likely to close the chapter on this and stop investigating how damaging this technology is for kids' mental health.