Instagram is still popular used among 13- to 17-year-olds, with 62% of teens using the app compared with TikTok’s 67% (Picture: Unsplash)
Social media giants like TikTok and Meta are pledging to enhance their parental supervision tools as they face increasing scrutiny over their effects on teen mental health.
On Tuesday, TikTok announced that it’s giving parents more control over what their teens can see by adding new content filtering controls to its Family Pairing feature.
This will let parents filter out videos containing specific words or hashtags to help reduce the likelihood of their teen viewing content they may find ‘jarring’. Teens can still see the keywords their caregiver has added.
‘We believe this transparency can also help to prompt conversations about online boundaries and safety,’ said a TikTok statement.
In March, the video-sharing platform announced that it would automatically limit daily screen time to 60 minutes for users below the age of 18.
TikTok announced that it’s giving parents more control over what their teens can see (Picture: Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
On the same day, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta also introduced new features giving parents the ability to view their children’s contacts on Messenger, the messaging app shared by Facebook and Instagram.
Parents can now view how much time their children spend in Messenger and whether their privacy settings allow messages from strangers. The contents of teens’ messages will still be hidden from their parents.
Meta is also testing a feature on Instagram that restricts users from messaging people who don’t follow them without first sending a text-only message request.
On Instagram, parents can also see how many friends their teen has in common with the accounts they follow or are followed by.
Similar to Instagram’s recent ‘Take a Break’ and ‘Quiet Mode’ features, teens will now get a notification when they’ve spent 20 minutes on Facebook, prompting them to step away from the app and set daily time limits.
Meta is also testing a feature on Instagram that restricts users from messaging people who don’t follow them without first sending a text-only message request (Picture: Meta)
However, the number of teens who use Facebook has dropped significantly during the past few years, from 71% in 2014 to 32% in 2022, according to data from the Pew Research Center.
Instagram is still popular among 13 to 17-year-olds, with 62% of teens using the app compared with TikTok’s 67%.
The UK’s long-awaited Online Safety Bill is nearing completion, with the most recent amendments allowing Ofcom to force tech platforms to hand over the personal data of children whose deaths are suspected to be related to online harm.
Previous amendments also include multi-million pound fines for social media companies or jail sentences of up to two years for tech bosses failing to protect children from child abuse and self-harm content.
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TikTok and Instagram are releasing new features.