Parental controls on Instagram and Messenger now reveal far more about what children are doing

In order to provide parents more control over their teen's activities on Messenger and Instagram DMs, Meta has announced a number of new safety options. As of right now, parents and guardians may see how much time their child spends on Messenger, get notifications when their contact lists or privacy settings change, and see how much time their teen spends on Messenger overall. Although they cannot change this setting, parents can now check which users—friends, friends of friends, or no one—can message their teenagers. According to Meta, these features specifically prevent parents from reading the contents of messages sent by teenagers on Instagram DM or Messenger.

The release of a damning Wall Street Journal report showing the ways pedophiles allegedly use Instagram to buy and sell juvenile sex content comes only weeks after the publishing of the new safety tools.Across the nation, state legislation that would require social media corporations to get parental permission before providing services to minors are surfacing. The modifications represent Meta's most recent effort to bounce back from a long history of complaints and papers that purportedly connected its goods to harming teens.

In order to communicate a user who doesn't follow them on Instagram, users must first issue an invite and request permission to join. This feature is currently being tested by Meta. The new function might be applied to all of Instagram and is not just for teenagers. In practice, it sounds a lot like the LinkedIn invite mechanism that is now in use. In an effort to stop users from receiving unsolicited photos or movies, Meta will restrict these invitations to text only.

The "Quiet Mode" feature, which momentarily pauses notifications and notifies other users that a user is unavailable, was introduced by Meta about six months prior to the introduction of these new Instagram restrictions. According to Meta, Quiet Mode will soon be accessible to Instagram users worldwide.

Additionally, Meta added a number of additional "nudges" designed to warn young players from getting hooked into a session of doom-scrolling. Young people who use Facebook for more than 20 minutes will now receive a new notification asking them to think about taking a break. The business also claims to be testing a feature that will prompt teenagers to end their use of Instagram if they are scrolling Reels in the wee hours of the morning. Both of those aspects follow a growing corpus of academic research that demonstrates a significant link between extended screen usage and symptoms of heightened anxiety and depression in some young users. Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, recently cited prolonged screen time as one of many "ample indicators" that social media poses a health risk.

Additionally, parents will now have more comprehensive access into how their teen uses Instagram. Teen users will now get a notice inviting them to designate their parents as a supervisor when they block someone. Additionally, parents will be able to view how many friends their adolescent shares with a certain account. Meta believes that by providing these resources and insights, teenagers will talk to their parents more about how they use social media.