NEW DELHI: Instagram unveiled its teen accounts feature on Tuesday, introducing enhanced safety measures to protect its growing user base in India, which exceeds 350 million.
Last year, the business debuted Teen Accounts in four countries: the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. Instagram users under the age of 16 had their profiles converted to these new categories with default restrictions by Meta. By design, these adolescent accounts are private and equipped with features like sleep mode, time limit reminders, interaction limits, content controls, and messaging restrictions.
Natasha Jog, Director of Public Policy India at Instagram, said in a blog post, “At Meta, creating a safer and more responsible digital environment is a top priority. With the expansion of Instagram Teen Accounts to India, we are strengthening protections, enhancing content controls, and empowering parents while ensuring a safer experience for teens.”
Users under the age of 16 will be required to obtain parental or guardian consent before making some changes to their account settings due to the adolescent account configuration. There will also be an option for parents to enable supervision of their teen’s account for users over the age of 16.
Even while parents can see their children’s contact information, they cannot view the content of their messages. They have the option to restrict app access at certain hours of the day and establish daily usage restrictions.
From a content perspective, Meta restricts message delivery to those with whom the user is already connected. According to the connected individuals’ criterion, the sender’s and receiver’s status on Meta platforms, as well as any previous direct message interactions between the two without mutual following, are taken into account. Teens can also be tagged by someone they are following.
Additionally, Meta automatically removes any content that may be offensive to teens from their accounts. Furthermore, the corporation is deleting content from the reels and the explore page that promotes cosmetics or features fights. For example, if a teen wants to customize their Explore page to display content related to soccer, crafts, dance, music & audio, cats, food & drink, or computer science, they can choose from a number of different themes.
Due to the prevalence of teenage fraud across platforms, Meta has announced that it is implementing measures such as ID verification and video selfie recording for user age verifications.
Companies in India are required to obtain verified parental consent before processing the data of users under the age of 18 according to new guidelines proposed by the country’s data protection law, which were unveiled last month. Additional security measures may be required of platforms once these regulations are finalized.