Meta’s Instagram is set to give parents more control of their teenagers’ social media accounts with the introduction of a series of privacy and safeguarding measures.
Dedicated ‘teen accounts’ for under-18s are being introduced this week across the UK, US, Canada and Australia, which will have a raft of privacy settings on by default. These will include making their content inaccessible to people who don’t follow them, and requiring them to manually approve all new followers.
Over-15s will be able to adjust these privacy settings as they please, but 13-15 year-olds will need to add a parent or guardian to their account to approve any changes.
The move comes as the social media giant has found itself under increasing pressure to put greater safety measures in place for teenage users in recent years, particularly since the Instagram-linked suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell in 2017.
Further restrictions on teen accounts will include strict controls on sensitive content and blocking potential harmful material from their recommendations, while notifications will be muted overnight to encourage healthier sleep patterns.
Parents will be able to oversee their children’s Instagram accounts, including who they message and the topics they are interested in. They will however not be able to view the content of the messages.
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“The big announcement in the wake of Molly’s story breaking in 2019 did not achieve the result that it sounded like it should have done,” Molly’s father, Ian Russell said.
“Meta comes up with wonderfully crafted PR-spun statements that sound really promising but time after time they don’t deliver. I hope this is a turning point when they consider safety to be equally important to the profits they are making.”
Other innovations will include the use of AI technology to ensure that a profile’s age is genuine, with any under-18s found to be using adult accounts immediately placed back into teen accounts.
Implementing these tools will require concrete enforcement from Instagram, with an Ofcom study carried out earlier this year revealing that very single child it spoke to had seen violent material online.
The ICO’s executive director of regulatory risk, Stephen Almond, said: “We welcome Instagram’s new protections for its younger users following our engagement with them.
“Our children’s code is clear that kids’ accounts must be set as ‘high privacy’ by default, unless there is a compelling reason not to do so. We’ll keep pushing where we think industry can go further, and take action where companies are not doing the right thing.”
