Instagram intends to tighten the privacy settings of its users under 16 years of age. Meta, which owns the service, has received strong criticism for the effects of the services on the well-being of young people.
The social media service Instagram has announced that it is tightening the privacy and security settings for the accounts of its underage users. The service owned by the technology company Meta presented on Tuesday in a blog post liuda changes with which Instagram aims to make its service safer for children.
The reform, named teen account, makes all accounts of users under the age of 16 private by default. This means that content published by these accounts will not be visible to anyone other than the user’s approved followers.
There have been new accounts created by minors before private by default. The reform announced now also applies to old accounts.
If a user under the age of 16 wants to change their Instagram account to public or change other account settings after the reform, they must get permission from their guardian.
In addition to this, Instagram is starting to limit content that can be shown to minors. The service also displays a notification when the child has spent more than an hour in the application.
Meta’s product director Naomi Gleit tells Platformer– publication that the main concern of parents is who can contact their child through the application, what kind of content the children see in the application and how much time they spend there.
According to Gleit, the company responds to these concerns with the teen account reform.
The reform will take effect globally next year
The change announced by Meta affects more than 100 million underage Instagram users. It is estimated that Meta’s decision will also create pressure on other platforms to act to protect underage users.
The strictures will come into effect first in the large English-speaking markets, i.e. the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Australia. This will happen over the next two months.
The rest of the world will follow from the beginning of next year.
It is not about a completely waterproof solution. Teenagers try and certainly succeed in circumventing even these restrictions. For example, Metal has no way of verifying that the account marked as a guardian actually belongs to the child’s guardian. Also, age verification is still difficult and unreliable.
With the reform, however, guardians have new tools to monitor children’s social media activity. For example, guardians will have the opportunity to see with whom the child is messaging. However, the content of the messages remains private.
Meta sued
Meta, which owns Instagram, has been sued several times for recommending harmful content to young people.
Late last year, more than 40 states sued Meta in the United States over Instagram’s harmful effects on children’s health. The lawsuit is based on a two-year investigation that began Francis Haugen data breach.
In addition to this, several US states and many countries have drafted bills to try to limit the activities of social media.