Instagram’s New Update is a Victory for Teen Safety
By Movieguide® Contributor
Instagram is taking new steps to protect teens on the app.
As of Sept. 16, all teen accounts for children 18 and younger will automatically be set to private.
“The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) said that Instagram’s move to automatically default minor accounts (age 16 and younger) to private is a big step towards ensuring safety. NCOSE had requested that Meta make minor accounts private, among other safety requests, in a letter to the company ahead of Meta being named to the 2024 Dirty Dozen List,” a press release from NCOSE read.
“While these settings will be turned on for all teens, 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to turn them off. Kids under 16 will need their parents’ permission to do so,” AP News reported.
CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation Dawn Hawkins said of the changes,
“Meta has taken a tremendous step forward to ensuring minors are better protected from harm by defaulting teen accounts to private,” said Dawn Hawkins, NCOSE’s CEO. “Instagram has been a leader in facilitating harm to minors — it’s been the top platform where perpetrators have threatened to and have actually distributed sextortion images. We are grateful that Meta has acted on our concerns to ensure that accounts belonging to teens 16 and younger are defaulted to the highest safety settings.”
Setting an Instagram account to private prevents people and predators from messaging children. Another feature of the private teen accounts is a “Sleep Mode” that silences all notifications from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.
“This really standardizes a lot of the work that we’ve done, simplifies it, and brings it to all teens. It provides essentially a set of protections that are in place and are already populated,” explained Antigone Davis, Meta’s head of global safety.
The new update also includes age verification measures set in place so that teens cannot lie about their age.
“We know some teens are going to try to lie about their age to get around these protections,” Davis said. “Which is why we are going to be building up new opportunities to verify a teen’s age.”
Parental controls are also being updated to help parents monitor their kids online. One feature will allow parents to see who their child messaged, without seeing the contents of the message. Additionally, they will be able to see what topics their children have been searching for.
Movieguide® previously reported on NCOSE’s 2024 Dirty Dozen List:
“The Dirty Dozen List is an annual campaign calling out twelve mainstream entities for facilitating, enabling, and even profiting from sexual abuse and exploitation,” NCOSE says.
“Since its inception in 2013, the Dirty Dozen List has galvanized thousands of individuals like YOU to call on corporations, government agencies, and organizations to change problematic policies and practices. This campaign has yielded major victories at Google, Netflix, TikTok, Hilton Worldwide, Verizon, Walmart, US Department of Defense, and many more,” NCOSE says…
The Communications Decency Act, Section 230, isn’t the typical tech company that usually appears on NCOSE’s annual list.
NCOSE says the law “sought to incentivize tech companies to actively safeguard younger users from harmful content. Congress added Section 230 to the CDA with the aim of fostering an environment where platforms could grow and flourish without fear of being held liable for content posted by third parties.”
