In welcome news, Instagram parent company Meta has announced that, over the coming months, it will transition all Instagram accounts held by users under the age of 18 into what is termed as “teen accounts.”
A teen account operates differently from a standard Instagram account:
- Privacy settings are turned on by default
- Teen accounts can only be viewed by logged-in users who are following them
- All followers must be actively approved
- Parents and guardians can set time limits on app usage
- Teens can be blocked by parents and guardians from using Instagram at certain times through the day
- Parents and guardians can see the accounts their child is exchanging messages with
- Parents and guardians can see the content categories their child is viewing
- Teens aged 13 to 15 will only be able to adjust the settings by adding a parent or guardian to their account
- Strict controls on sensitive content will prevent recommendations of potentially harmful material
- Notifications are muted overnight.
The new teen accounts launch this coming Tuesday.
Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg said on Tuesday that “This is a very significant moment.
“The common refrain we keep hearing from parents is that ‘we want to exercise our responsibilities and obligations as parents’, but across the multiple apps that young people now use, parents were being left somewhat confused and disempowered from playing their role as parents.
“This (change) really tries to very meaningfully shift the balance in favour of parents by basically putting teens into the strictest default settings over what content they see, who they can be connected with, what time they can spend … and crucially, if you’re under 16, they’ll have to ask mum and dad if they can change those settings.”
Snapchat snaps back
Snapchat, a social messaging platform that competes with Instagram for younger users, has an industry standard verification system in place that requires users to self-verify their age. It doesn’t have the sophisticated functionality Meta has announced today.
Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, told the Sydney Morning Herald that parents and guardians already have the ability to restrict their children’s access. He believes this control should be done on the device and not on the app.
“Parents have already got these tools today,” Spiegel said. “We use the iOS-level controls and screen time to limit what our teen – we’ve got an almost 14-year-old at home – what he’s able to use. We have ‘family centre’ as well inside of Snapchat that allows parents to monitor their teens’ activity on Snapchat and put in place more stringent content controls and things like that.
“We’ve really done a lot to empower parents to make the right choices for their teenagers. And again, all those tools already exist for parents who would rather restrict the use of certain apps for their teens.
“Age collection is already part of the device ID process when registering a new device, such as an iPhone or Android phone,” it said. “We believe that leveraging the potential of device-level age verification could drive significant progress in what has remained an intractable policy challenge until now.”
Spiegel’s views counter comments made by Nick Clegg last week in London, who advised that parents often don’t go to the effort of using tools to help manage their kids social media.
“One of the things we do find … is that even when we build these controls, parents don’t use them,” he said. “So we have a bit of a behavioural issue, which is: we as an engineering company might build these things, and then we say at events like this: ‘Oh, we’ve given parents choices to restrict the amount of time kids are [online]’ – parents don’t use it.”
Meta will introduce AI tools to verify the ages of its users, with trials to begin in the US next year. But, Meta caution that no solution will ever work 100%.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri says: “It would be amazing if we could catch 70 per cent of teens with 70 per cent accuracy.”
Balancing the need for user-privacy and safety needs to be considered. He explains: “We are talking about collecting people’s biometric face data or government IDs … these are very sensitive pieces of information that I would rather not collect”.
