Instagram is revamping its youth safety strategy by giving parents more oversight over what their teenagers are doing online, Meta said Tuesday, as the social media giant seeks to assuage critics who say its services compromise adolescents’ well-being. Meta, which owns Instagram, said it would bolster efforts to limit the time teenagers spend on the social networking site, what content they see and which strangers are able find their accounts and talk to them. The new safety measures — introduced by Meta as part of a new “teen accounts” program — will also give parents more insight into the people their children are talking to and the types of posts they are consuming, while still offering the ability to set limits on their accounts.
“We are changing the experience for millions of teens on our app,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said in an interview. “We’re reimagining that parent-child relationship online in response to what we heard from parents about how they parent, or want to be able to parent.” The new rules won’t immediately apply to Meta’s original social network, Facebook, which is larger than Instagram but less popular among American teenagers.
Meta, which also owns WhatsApp, said it would put other apps under similar new rules in the coming months. Meta’s new default protections for teens are meant to help address long-standing allegations that the design of Instagram intentionally keep teens addicted to its services whil.