Parental control is mandatory for children under 16 years old

After the arrival of ratings in Europe as one of the latest developments of the social networking application, Instagram is now preparing to take a big step to protect teenagers, and parents have greater control over the content they can see. The platform owned by Meta announced “teen accounts”which limits who can contact them and what content can be generated in the app.

The new feature called “Teen Accounts” aims to protection of adolescents under 16 years of age spam. Meaning only people they follow or are already connected can message them to keep strangers at bay via direct messages.

There is an important point in these stories and that is that They are private by default

which means that while they can accept new subscribers, random subscribers cannot view or interact with their content. Another cool feature is that parents can check if the minor has received recent messages, but they won’t be able to read the content.

But that’s not all, since Meta includes a automatic configuration to all these accounts to restrict the content they can see; and applies to both new and existing users in the app. The so-called “sensitive content control” is applied in such a way that certain types of content are avoided in spaces such as the wall or the Reels themselves.

In fact, to modify certain privacy settings on the teen account need parental permission; when these same are available for accounts over 16 years old, provided that their account is supervised, so in this case they need parental consent to make changes.

With just these mentioned changes, Meta puts in place many barriers to protect the accounts of teenagers, but it did not stop at these, but there are many more: they could be configured so that they can be tagged and mentioned only for people they follow. Another level of privacy will be the “hidden words” feature, which, if enabled, hides offensive language from comments and private messages.

Limit screen time

And the l ist of changes is long to add other features related to the duration of use of the application: “Daily Limit” so that after 60 minutes

The app will recommend a break and teens will need parental approval to extend the duration.

Finally, according to Engadgetthe last option is Sleep mode that stops notifications after ten in the evening and until 7 in the morning. The idea of ​​Meta is that existing users receive the alert of the change of their teenage account and new users already have this configuration by default.

Now, since the announcement on its website, Meta maintains that it is planned to deploy these accounts in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia in the next 60 days, while in Europe and Europe it would be at the end of this year. The global deployment would take place for the month of January and will extend in the same way to other Meta platforms such as Facebook.