Teenagers signing up for Instagram will be given a new type of account with parental controls by default, the company has announced.
Accounts for those under 18 will be automatically private, with the strictest sensitive content settings, and they will be limited to messaging only those they are already connected with.
They will have sleep mode on by default, which will mute notifications and auto-reply to direct messages between 10pm and 7am each day.
Users under 16 will need a parent’s permission to change any of the default settings.
The move comes after major pressure to protect young users, after high profile deaths linked to social media use.
Campaigner Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly died by suicide aged 14, said he was not convinced today’s news went far enough. Any step towards digital safety is ‘welcome’, he said, but there could still be relatively simple ways around the measures.
‘Effective age assurance will be required to stop ‘age liars’ beating the system,’ he said. ‘Nick Clegg said only last week, parental controls have been proven to be ineffective as there’s very low take-up, these new IG Teen Accounts rely heavily on parental engagement.
‘Parents currently report they feel their children’s peer pressure, this is often why they give them a smartphone, even if they’d prefer not to. Similar transferred peer pressure will apply to the new, on-by-default 13-15 safety settings, parents are likely to feel compelled to disable the measures if this is the norm among teens.’
Under the new major safety update, young teen accounts will also have their interactions limited so that only people they follow can tag or mention them, as well as be sent a notification telling them to leave the app after an hour’s use each day.
Parents will also have the option to see who their teenagers have been messaging in the past seven days (though not the messages themselves), set daily time limits for Instagram app usage, block app use for specific time periods and see the topics their child has been looking at.
Children aged under 13 are already barred from having their own accounts on Instagram, with any accounts for younger users required to clearly state they are managed by an adult.
Users will be asked to verify their age by uploading ID, getting vouched for by others, or taking a video selfie.
New teenage users under 18 who sign up from today will be placed into a Teen Account, Meta said.
Existing users will begin being moved onto the new system next week, with plans to have teenagers in the UK, US, Canada and Australia on the new accounts within two months, and those in the EU later this year.
Teens over 18 will not be affected.
The announcement comes as social media platforms continue to face regulatory pressure to better protect users, particularly children, from harmful content online – with the Online Safety Act that will require firms to protect children from such content due to fully come into force in the UK next year.
There have been several cases of children who died after being exposed to harmful material online, leading to high profile campaigns for better protections. Among them are:
Molly took her own life aged 14 in November 2017 after viewing suicide and other harmful content on Instagram and Pinterest.
A coroner ruled the schoolgirl, from Harrow in north-west London, died from ‘an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content’.
In a hearing which put tech giants in the spotlight, Andrew Walker said material she was consuming in the lead-up to her death ‘shouldn’t have been available for a child to see’.
The youngster lost consciousness after ‘inhaling toxic substances’ during a sleepover at a friend’s house on March 2, before later dying in hospital.
His death was believed to have been linked to a social media trend called ‘chroming,’ which involves inhaling toxic chemicals such as paint, solvents, aerosols, cleaning products or petrol.
His grandmother Tina blamed TikTok for his death, saying: ‘We don’t want any other children to follow TikTok or be on social media. In fact, we want to get TikTok taken down and no children to be allowed on any social media under 16 years of age.’
The schoolboy is believed to have died after taking part in a ‘choke challenge’ he had seen on social media.
His mum Lisa has spoken out to say how her son’s inquisitive nature made him vulnerable to harmful content online.
Former deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg, now Meta’s president of global affairs, said the aim of the change was to ‘shift the balance in favour of parents’ when it came to using parental controls, while also hoping it would ‘act as a catalyst for a wider debate’ around enhanced online safety tools.
He said of the new settings ‘might mean that some teens may use our apps less’ but he said it was a necessary change.
Sir Nick added that a ‘wider ecosystem-level debate’ was needed around age verification tools which worked across different apps, rather than having to be implemented by each individual platform.
He said ‘there isn’t a world in which app-by-app solutions are sufficient’.
Instead, he suggested there should be ‘app store-level age verification, which is not a huge lift because (Apple’s) iOS and (Google’s) Android collect all that data already.’
Ian Russell continued: ‘As ever, any step toward digital safety is welcome but its effectiveness can only be judged when there is evidence to show they have reduced online harms and children are better separated from them. It will take time for the platforms and civil society to asses the effectiveness of the new measures.
‘The platform should also be expecting to tweak the measures to block loop-holes and drive them to be as effective as possible. The constant iterative improvement required to keep any new measures working should also be reported on by IG. Transparency, as ever is required if civil society is to judge effectiveness.’
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