Teenagers are addicted to social media and worry too much about their appearance. Coupled with the frequent occurrence of online school bullying, suicides and shootings, the United States, regardless of political party, agrees that social media must take responsibility for teenagers and children.
The two most criticized social media platforms during the House of Representatives hearing on February 1 this year were TikTok and Instagram. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg bowed and apologized to the parents of the victims at the request of lawmakers. Zuckerberg promised parents that Meta would invest more project budgets to protect children.
9/17 Meta announced the launch of IG Teen, which allows parents to monitor the use of Instagram by teenagers under the age of 16 to a limited extent. It is currently only available in some countries and regions and will be gradually launched globally in 2025. According to the official website, IG Teen uses a built-in mechanism to automatically classify teenagers under the age of 16 into the Teen category.
The average legal age of majority in every state in the United States is 18 to 21 years old. The gun sales regulations in many states state that as long as you are 18 years old, you can legally buy a long gun, and if you are 21 years old, you can buy a handgun from a registered store. The age at which teenagers in the United States can purchase alcohol is 21. According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, age restrictions can effectively curb teen car accidents and alcohol addiction. IG Guardrails for under-16s may allow teenagers to avoid the influence of social media before they can legally purchase alcohol and guns.
Key protective measures introduced by IG Teen
IG youth accounts are automatically imported into Meta’s parental protection mechanism. The main measures include limiting the time teenagers spend on social media, the thresholds for being added as friends and browsing content, and the requirement for teenagers to obtain parental consent to remove protection restrictions, etc.
Meta further explained that the new IG Teen accounts are all "private accounts". Teenagers can only receive and send messages to accounts that are friends of each other. Teenagers will be supervised by their parents on the content they watch and the messages they send. Parents can see messages a teen has sent over the past seven days, as well as time spent on IG and topics their child is following.
How does IG verify a child’s true age?
The new mechanism allows teenagers to upload their ID cards and use Yoti, an AI facial recognition company, when registering for Instagram. This is a way that IG believes can verify the age of children. Nowadays, children are not honest about their age. Yoti uses AI to scan faces. Assisting in determining "true age" sounds a bit strange, and many parents immediately responded that if this was done, their children would directly use TikTok.
IG also has two ways for children to verify their age, uploading a self-introduction video or asking peers to verify their age. But this is still a lot of people's thinking, just like in the real world, adults don't make bad friends for children. The extreme way is to lock him up and prevent him from contact with the outside world, or only instill content that his parents like. .
In the United States, which emphasizes personal freedom, Instagram has suddenly turned into an after-school tutoring camp for teenagers, with strict control over content and friendship conditions. Children will also watch TikTok, Reddit and Youtube, and may even want to watch content that is not allowed to be seen. Will IG's "innovation" this year become another experiment using teenagers as guinea pigs? Parents will have more headaches.
This article Meta launches IG Teen account to allow parents to monitor children under 16 years old first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.