In response to gowing child safety concerns from parents and youth groups, Meta-owned social media app Instagram has implemented new restrictions for users under the age of 18.
The new features include automatically setting every teen's account — of which there are 100M globally — to private, limiting their direct messaging (DM) only to accounts they follow, and reducing the amount of adult-oriented content they see.
Instagram is taking extraodinary measures to protect young people and their mental health. Not only has it imposed account privatization and restricted access to harmful content, but it's utilizing AI to enforce these rules on a global scale. While tens of millions teens already admit their real age, those who try and bypass the restrictions will have a very tough time of it.
Instagram is only taking these measures because the US government is discussing new regulations. And even with these new rules, teens will still create fake accounts, or 'finstas,' which will allow them to easily bypass each of these guardrails. With this bandaid-of-a-policy now in place, the company will ask its paid-off friends in the government to please stop investigating how awful their technology is for kids.