Instagram has announced news for the time management teens spends on the app starting early next year. The company’s goal is to allow better control over the amount of time that the very young spend on the app, in an attempt to protect the latter by imposing a daily time limit and content more in line with their age.
The new feature is announced by Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, with a post on the social media blog: the importance of working to improve the safety of teenagers who use the app is reiterated, and the need to introduce new tools.
We will have a more restrictive approach on what we recommend (in the feed) to the app’s teenage users, we will block the possibility for people to tag or mention very young people who do not follow, we will diversify the offer of content and themes if they focus for too long. on a single topic and we will launch the Take a Break function in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
In the first months of next year, improved time management should arrive on Instagram that will allow parents and guardians to be more involved in the social experience of children, allowing them to impose time limits and analyze the number of hours spent on social.
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The very young will also have an option to notify parents when a user is reported, thus offering the possibility for parents to talk about it with their children. To this possibility is added the Take a Break feature: it will be the app, through on-screen notifications, that will ask users to take a break from compulsive scrolling, also suggesting the setting of a reminder to allow themselves more frequent breaks in the future. According to preliminary studies carried out by Instagram, 90% of teenagers who use Take a Break for the first time continue to use the feature in the future.
Added to this is greater control over the contents of the Search, Explore, Hashtag and Suggested Accounts sections: it is not known exactly by which criteria the search results and content will be modified to be in line with teens who use Instagram.
After the change of name of Facebook to Meta, all the companies of the group – which also include WhatsApp and Instagram – seem to want to give a new image: unfortunately, there are evident critical issues that the companies have never solved. Such as the block to the development of a specific version of Instagram for children under 13 in the light of an internal report commissioned by Facebook and Instagram which clearly shows how social networks are detrimental to the mental health of adolescents.