Meta Strengthens Child Safety on Instagram with New Parental Approval Features

Many social media apps are introducing child safety features on their apps to keep children and teens from the dangers lurking around social media. Instagram has taken the step to make all accounts of teens private on its platform and have also limited their DMs in an attempt to shield children. If some teens want to change the settings of a “teen account”, they would need parent’s approval first.

Meta’s head of product, Naomi Gelt, says that Instagram has taken this step because of parents’ concern about extra time spent, inappropriate contact and unwanted contact their children often encounter on the app. When teens are on private accounts, they would only be able to message or tag the people they follow. Instagram will also make screen time reminders for children.

Meta has always been a target because of its no-so-friendly child policies on the app. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg apologized to parents whose children died because of social media. Now Meta has blocked all the harmful content like eating disorder, self harm and nudity to teen users. Congress also passed the Kids Online Safety Act which asked all the apps to block harmful content. There are still concerns about child’s freedom of speech regarding the bill, but if it passes in the House it will bring a lot of safety to children online.

Meta also now only allows children of ages 13 and above to make an account. Even if they can lie about their ages, Meta has partnered up with Yoti, a British Company, which helps Meta identify someone's age by looking at their face. Many social media apps are also now asking people who are making new accounts to submit their video and picture as a proof that they aren't lying about their age.

Parental control on social media apps is also being strictly available. But Meta is working on a feature which will only allow parental controls to a parent or a guardian after verifying that they are indeed a parent or guardian. But this could also have harmful effects because if a child is in an abusive household, their guardians can stop the teens from raising their voices or finding their identities.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World