To enhance security across its platforms, Meta has developed new features to protect teen users’ experience on Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook.
Parents can now supervise their teens’ activities across meta platforms through the new quiet mode and the family centre features. In addition, stricter messaging features are included, with the teens being nudged to spend less time on social media platforms using prompt messages at intervals.
Meta’s new feature will significantly impact the quest to protect teens’ online space and limit them to age-appropriate content, as parents and guardians have the liberty of shaping their teens’ online lives and controlling the amount of time their children spend online.
Prompt messages like “You have been online for twenty minutes” will enable teenagers online to monitor how much time they spend on the internet. Isn’t that great?
The young stars are yet advised to take comprehensive steps concerning marking their screen time with prompt messages informing them about how long they have been online. At the same time, parents can get notifications when their teen reports an online account that threatens their safety with the family centre feature.
With the new privacy feature, parents offer support to their teens. Moreover, they get to monitor their child’s online activity and see who can see their stories posted on the teenager’s account.
Further precautions have been taken to ensure that teens are safer online, such as they cannot receive messages from any unknown account by default or on the following basis in which only the accounts followed by the teen and follow back have permission to message the teen user account.
Interestingly, Meta limits this by changing the standard format of direct inbox messaging into requests for teenagers’ accounts, which varies depending on the country’s age limit and the scope that has the updates in their feeds.
Meta says, “To help protect teens from unwanted contact on Instagram, we restrict adults over the age of 19 from messaging teens who don’t follow them, and we limit the type and number of direct messages (DMs) people can send to someone who doesn’t follow them to one text-only message.”
The requests to message teens are only limited to text messages, locking out possible dangers and threats that pose as cyberbullying and online harassment.
With these phenomenal steps, Meta makes a milestone in teen and child protection online safety. These new features will lock cyber bullies, stalkers, and sexual harassers from accessing teenagers’ spaces online.
According to DoSomething.org, “About 37% of young people between the ages of 12 and 17 have been bullied online. 30% have had it happen more than once.”
These newly developed features will bridge parents and experts on the meta platform to collaborate, protect, and support teenagers in an increasingly dangerous online world. They are significantly changing it into a safer and friendlier environment.
