Meta Sets New Limits for Teenage Instagram Users

It took nearly 14 years, but Meta is finally building a safer version of Instagram for 14-year-olds.

On Tuesday, the tech giant announced it will roll out a feature to automatically place teenaged users into a new type of Instagram account with beefed-up privacy settings and toggles for parental controls, among other measures. The move comes not-so-coincidentally as a pair of bills regulating online safety and privacy move further and further along Washington’s legislative pipeline.

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The walls have been closing in on Meta for a bit now. Just under a year ago, attorneys general in 41 states plus DC sued the company, alleging its platforms are harmful and addictive to children. Then, just a week ago, 42 state attorneys general endorsed a proposal to add warning labels to the platform from the US Surgeon General. But perhaps most distressing to Zuckerberg and friends are the pair of bills — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the ​​Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), an update of the bill from 1998 — that passed through the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support back in July. The former would place a legal “duty of care” on online platforms to protect underage users from harm, while the latter would place a ban on targeted advertising to minors, and give kids and their parents far greater control on what types of data are collected. 

Both bills return to the House of Representatives on Wednesday for markups. For Meta, that makes it as good a time as any to finally follow through on years of promises to start self-policing its products:

• The new teen version will place all users under 16 into private Instagram accounts, which introduce parental control settings and place restrictions on recommended content. The users will have to accept new followers in order to interact with them as well.
• The app will ping teen users with a “daily limit” notification after an hour of usage, and automatically turn off notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. (which sound like excellent features for adult users too, if you ask us).

Panic Time: Whether the changes will cool some jets over in Congress remains an open question. And, of course, savvy teens will surely find loopholes and easy workarounds. Big Tech-focused newsletter Platformer reported this week that Meta C-suite players privately complain the backlash the firm faces is little more than moral panic. Still, the Meta empire is growing slightly more comfortable with self-policing; also on Tuesday, it announced it will be banning content from Russian-state media network RT on its platforms, just days after the Biden White House accused it of acting as an arm of Russia’s spy network. We’ll find out soon if lawmakers are sufficiently impressed with the last-minute efforts.