Meta introducing new rules for Instagram users born in these years
Meta is set to introduce ‘teen accounts’ to Instagram as governments consider social media age limits. Meta says the launch of ‘teen accounts’ on Instagram is unrelated to Australian government proposals to introduce social media age limits.
In an announcement today (Tuesday September 17), Meta says it is launching teen accounts for Instagram that will apply to new users. The settings and new rules will affect users who are under-16, born post 2008, the announcement says.
Changes under the teen account setting include giving parents the ability to set daily time limits for using the app, block teens from using Instagram at certain times, see the accounts their child is messaging and viewing the content categories they are viewing.
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Meta’s director of global safety, Antigone Davis, said that the decision to introduce teen accounts was driven by parents and not by any government legislation or proposals. “Parents everywhere are thinking about these issues,” Davis told Guardian Australia.
“The technology at this point is pretty much ubiquitous, and parents are thinking about it. From the perspective of youth safety, it really does make the most sense to be thinking about these kinds of things globally and addressing parents concerns globally.”
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said the key motivator for the policy to raise the age teenagers can access social media was to have them having “real experiences”. “Well what we want to [do] is to get our kids off their devices and on to the footy fields or the netball courts, to get them interacting with real people, having real experiences,” he told Channel Seven’s Sunrise program. “And we know that social media is doing social harm.”
But Davis said teenagers would view social media as also providing “real” experiences for them. “For the teen who plays soccer and is on the soccer team and is trying to perfect a particular kick or a particular pass, they’re going to use social media to figure that out, and in a way that we might not have done, and in some ways that’s the real value,” she said.
“I think they move much more fluidly through these apps and their online and offline world. I don’t think they make this that separation.” Sir Nick Clegg, who now works as Meta’s president of global affairs, said the aim of the overhaul is to “shift the balance in favour of parents” when it came to using parental controls.
"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," Sir Nick told PA.
"And yes, from our point of view it might mean that some teens may use our apps less, but we feel, given everything we have learned and heard over the last, crucial years – and quite rightly, we’ve been put under an immense amount of scrutiny on these issues – we felt it was time now to shift the playing field in favour of simple, transparent, easy-to-use controls for parents, that’s the motivation behind this."