Meta’s instituting new Teen Account protections that are a step in the right direction, but there’s still a long way to go.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has been trying to implement good parental controls since before it changed its name, and while today’s announcement is another step in the right direction, there are still some glaring holes in the protections.
Earlier this year, Meta added restrictions to teens’ DMs on Facebook and Instagram. On Tuesday, Meta announced new restrictions that will automatically place all teens between the ages of 13-18—with new and existing accounts—into Teen Accounts. These new accounts will be private by default, have messaging restrictions, sensitive content restrictions, limited interactions, time limit reminders, and a sleep mode that’s automatically enabled.
For all teens under the age of 16, parents must be added to change any of those settings (teens who are 17 or older can change the settings themselves, but they will still automatically be thrown into the teen account). It seems to be a great way to help protect teens from the dangers of social media, including human trafficking. There’s just one problem. The teen has to designate who their parent is.
Most teens will likely designate their own parent, but there’s very little verification in place to ensure that the person a teen says is their parent actually is. Lifewire contacted Meta for additional information about how the company plans to verify parents going forward. According to the response we received, Meta claims to take steps to confirm someone is eligible to supervise a teen account, including limiting the number of accounts a parent or guardian can supervise and ensuring that accounts that are supervised don’t supervise other accounts.
What’s important in this process is that the “parent” needs to be old enough to change the permission on the teen’s Instagram account. In some situations, the person the teen chooses as a parent might just be an older friend who can manage their parental controls.
So, while Meta’s new efforts to protect teens on Instagram will go a long way toward providing safety for more teens in the future, some glaring holes in their process still need to be addressed.
Meanwhile, all teens signing up for an Instagram account starting today will be automatically placed into a Teen account and teens with existing accounts can expect theirs to be converted starting next week.
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- Are Meta's New Instagram Controls for Teens Any Good Without Parental Verification?
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