Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced that starting in March, the social network will provide parents and guardians of teenagers with tools to see how many hours or minutes kids spend on the app and set daily time limits. “It will be the first version of these tools, we will continue to add features over time,” said Mosseri, without giving any further details on how the parents' accounts will be linked to those of their children.
In recent months the activity of Facebook and Instagram has been strongly questioned by some inquiries and by the information contained in the documents released by the “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, former employee of Meta, the new name of the company that controls the two social networks .
One of the documents showed how Facebook, despite having received a report on the psychological distress caused by the teenagers from Instagram, had not taken any initiative to solve the problem. In theory, the use of the app is forbidden for people under the age of 13 (in some countries you have to be even older to use it) but there are no systems to make sure that younger children do not use it.
In November, the attorneys general of 11 US states launched an investigation into the techniques used by Meta to increase the frequency and duration of involvement of young people and the physical and mental damage caused by prolonged involvement. On December 8, Mosseri will have to speak before a commission of the American Senate to answer a series of questions on the impact of social networks on children and adolescents.
In addition to the control tools for parents, as early as January Instagram will introduce a function to allow all users to delete multiple posts, comments and likes at the same time, instead of one at a time. Furthermore, users will no longer be allowed to tag the profiles of teenagers who do not follow them (the tag creates a link to the profile of the indicated person and notifies them).
