Instagram Adds New Parental Controls

Meta has never failed to amuse us with its fresh, interesting, and useful updates. Meta has now launched a set of new parental control features aiming to safeguard the mental health of young Instagram users.

The new capabilities allow parents to set a daily time limit of 15 minutes to 2 hours, after which the app would be blocked with a dark screen. Parents can now send invites to enable parental control when previously it had to be initiated by the child. Parents will be able to arrange break periods and have access to data if their children report another Instagram account.

It also introduced a new feature called “Nudge”. The new nudges will be delivered in two ways, the first of which will be a completely new notice which aims  to steer users away from potentially dangerous topics.

As explained by Instagram:

“Teens in certain countries will see a notification that encourages them to switch to a different topic if they’re repeatedly looking at the same type of content on Explore. This nudge is designed to encourage teens to discover something new and excludes certain topics that may be associated with appearance comparison.”

They created this new feature because research shows that nudges can help individuals, particularly teenagers, be more aware of how they’re using social media at the moment. 

In a study on the effects of nudges on social media use, 58.2 percent of respondents agreed that nudges improved their social media experience by assisting them in becoming more attentive to their time spent on the platform. One in five teens who saw our new nudges shifted to a different topic over a one-week testing period, according to their own study done by Instagram itself.

Meta Instagram is now introducing the “Take a Break” feature to remind individuals to take a break from Instagram. When teens have been scrolling in Reels for a long time, they will soon launch new reminders for them to turn on Take a Break, which will help them to concentrate more on other stuff rather than the use of the phone for a long period of time.

Parents and guardians can now do the following on Instagram:

• When their child complains about an account or a post, they can learn more about who was reported and what type of report it was.

• Set aside particular hours of the day or week to restrict their teen’s Instagram usage.

• Invite their teenagers to use supervision tools by sending them invitations. At first, only teenagers were allowed to submit invitations.

Meta is also releasing a parental dashboard for its Quest VR headsets, in addition to Instagram. You may use the VR features to require purchase approval, ban certain apps, regulate screen time, and see the teen’s friend list.

If you already have Instagram supervision set up in the United States, these upgrades, along with our other supervision capabilities, are now available. These capabilities will begin to roll out to additional countries this month, including the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Ireland, Canada, France, and Germany, with ambitions to be global by the end of the year.