Several months after a Facebook whistleblower raised worries about the platform’s influence on younger users, Instagram is releasing new parental supervision tools that parents can use to help monitor and limit their children’s use of the social media platform. Meta issued this update on Wednesday, and it’s currently available only in the United States.
These parental control tools can be accessed in the “Family Center” dashboard. Meta had stated that it’s a central hub of safety measures that parents will be able to access to limit what their children can see and do throughout the company’s platforms, beginning with Instagram.
Meanwhile, this update was first introduced in a blog post by Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri late last year, along with several other features intended specifically at teen users at the time, such as one that encourages users to take a break from the app after a set length of time.
Details about this New Parental Supervision Controls
The new set of parental controls gives parents and guardians valuable insight into their children’s Instagram behavior. The capabilities will allow parents to keep track of how much time their children spend on the app, receive notifications about accounts they’ve recently followed and who has followed them, and monitor how much time their children spend on the app.
The tools are described by the social media company as the “first step in a longer-term journey,” however it’s unclear why it took so long to take these modest steps to safeguard kids from the nasty aspects of its app.
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Teenage Instagram users will have to enable the safety tools from within their accounts for the time being, while the company claims that parents will be able to initiate the supervision mode by June. Instagram also aims to provide more controls, such as an option that allows multiple parents to co-supervise an account and a mechanism for parents to limit app usage to specific hours.
We could say that Meta is doing so in response to competition from other social media companies. For instance, TikTok provided capabilities to allow parents to monitor their children’s app activity two years ago, and the controls have since been tweaked to be more granular. This sounds like a form of improvement with more updates expected to be rolled out soon.
