Facebook Messenger to Add Parental Controls
By Movieguide® Contributor
Facebook Messengers, Meta, has added various tools to its Family Center that will enable parents to see and even control how their children are using Messenger.
Engadget reported that parents and guardians will now have access to their child’s messages. This will allow the parent to see who can message their child and who can see their child’s stories.
In addition, parents will be able to see how much time their kids are spending on the app.
Engagdet stated, “Aside from these new parental tools, Meta will now show teens a notification when they’ve already spent 20 minutes on Facebook to urge them to set daily time limits. For Instagram, it’s exploring a new nudge feature that will ask teens to close the app if they’ve been scrolling Reels at night. Meta has also expanded its parental controls for Instagram to show parents how many friends their teen has in common with accounts they follow and are followed by. Plus, teens will get a new notification after they’ve blocked someone, encouraging them to add their parents to supervise their account.”
Social Media Today went even further to add, “Meta added similar nudges on Instagram back in 2021, in response to concerns about the potential negative impacts of Instagram use, particularly on younger audiences. Though it’s only the actual alerts that are new – both Facebook and Instagram have had time limit reminders available to users since 2018, so functionally, you’ve been able to set up these types of restrictions for years. But this adds a new type of alert in-stream, which could help to raise awareness of such.”
Finally, Meta is “rolling out Quiet Mode, which mutes all notifications and changes a user’s profile status, on Instagram around the world over the coming weeks. It’s also currently testing a couple of new features meant to protect Instagram users from unwanted DMs.”
Moveiguide® previously reported on Facebooks parental controls:
Clegg said that Facebook had invested $13 billion to ensure the safety of its user. However, Clegg recognized the company’s lack of accountability brought up by Haugen before congress.
“We need greater transparency,” Clegg told CNN, adding that Facebook should be held accountable so that “people can match what our systems say they’re supposed to do from what actually happens.”
