New Instagram Teen Accounts demonstrate a shift toward proactive protection of children and young people against online harms by putting in place default settings that aim to improve privacy, safety and wellbeing, as well as options for parental supervision.
The age to set up an Instagram account is 13 years old. Instagram is not kicking off the youngest teenagers who most often use these apps but establishing “supervision” that gives parents more entitlements to monitor their children’s online activity using social media platforms.
The options for parental supervision are a step in the right direction. However, they still put the focus on parents and carers to understand parental supervision settings and indicate parents have the primary responsibility for safety. Tech companies must take equal responsibility for safety on their platforms and services enabling a rife online space at times for bullying and and unsafe and harmful messages to be spread to children. The burden should never fall solely on the user either.
The ‘Teen Accounts’ automatically apply to users aged 13 to 17, with built-in limitations on who can contact them and the content they can view, which can be damaging material for their age group.
‘Sensitive content’ is filtered out from accounts of teens and they can only be messaged or tagged by people they follow or are already connected to. Parents have more sight of the accounts their teenagers use if they are under the age of 16, imposing daily time limits on the use of the app, seeing content categories they view and the accounts their children message, even unlocking protective settings.
