Meta is giving their parents more power over their children's Instagram accounts, a move that moody teenagers around the world will surely love.
What happened: Starting this week, teenagers will be automatically assigned special “Teenage Accounts” with built-in protections around who can contact them and what content they see. It’s the latest move in a broader shift towards tightening teen safety online.
- In January, Snap added features that allow parents to monitor their kids’ activity.
- Last week, YouTube also began letting parents link their accounts to their teens.
Why it matters: Social media platforms have become online hubs where child abuse runs rampant. In fact, the rates of child sexual abuse material (CASM) found on social media platforms spiked contemporaneously with a rise in sex crimes against Canadian children.
- Parental controls could also help prevent cyberbullying on social media, something that one in four Canadian adolescents say they’ve experienced.
Yes, but: These tools won’t do much if parents don’t use them — and right now, almost none do. In January, Snapchat and instant messaging platform Discord admitted to the U.S. government that fewer than 1% of parents of underage users use monitoring tools.—QH