Instagram has launched a few initiatives to help young users more safely use the platform.
Late last year, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on consumer protection questioned Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram on the platform’s ability to harm young users. The new features are an effort to combat any residual concerns people have about the platform’s negative impact kids and teens.
Parents and guardians will now be able to:
- Send invites to their teens to initiate supervision tools.
- Set parameters for the day or week they’d like to restrict their teen’s usage.
- Learn more information whenever their teen reports an account or post, such as who was reported and the type of report.
Outside the U.S, these tools will start rolling out to the U.K., Japan, Australia, Ireland, Canada, France and Germany sometime this month. The features will roll out to the rest of the world by the end of the year.
The platform itself will now be sending notifications to prompt teens to explore different types of content. The notifications will be triggered if a user is continuously looking at the same type of content on Explore.
“This nudge is designed to encourage teens to discover something new and exclude certain topics that may be associated with appearance comparison,” Meta says in a news release.
Meta says they designed the feature based on research that shows 58.2% of people agree or strongly agree that nudges make their social media experience better by helping them be more conscious of time spent on platforms.
In Meta’s own research, they saw during a one-week test period that one in five teens who saw nudges switched to a different topic.
In December, Instagram kicked off their new approach to youth safety by launching “Take A Break,” reminders that could be set up every 10, 20 or 30 minutes to encourage users to step away from the app.
Next, the platform plans to send reminders for when teens are scrolling Reels for too long.
